Composable business: why analysts say it’s the future

For many years, the key goals of businesses across the Middle East and Africa had been focused on improving efficiency, increasing productivity, and growing revenues. However, this had often been achieved to the detriment of resilience and agility, which was highlighted over the past year when major disruption hit and many business processes being too brittle to adapt had simply broke.

As businesses across the region undergo the rebuilding of processes, leaders must design architecture that enables improved access to information with the ability to augment that information with greater insight, and can change and respond to decisions made more quickly.

Research firm Gartner has coined some significant phrases over the years, but their newest one is what will introduce the kind of resilient and flexible business processes that businesses need to adopt to enable recovery, and that is the “Composable Business”.

What is composable business?

There are three words we heard a lot of in 2020. Uncertainty. New normal. Agility. The COVID-19 pandemic uprooted so much of our world, fundamentally changing the way we work, live, consume content, shop and engage. Some hope the old normal will return. Others eagerly await a new and improved normal. But analysts believe we’ll never truly settle. In fact, they say the new normal might just be constant, disruptive change.

What does this mean for businesses? It means that speed, resilience, flexibility and agility aren’t just characteristics needed to survive the pandemic. They’re characteristics defining the future enterprise – and they’re here to stay.

And this is what shapes the essence of ‘composable business’. Because the pace of business change is only going to accelerate, composable business means “creating an organisation made from interchangeable building blocks.” It means architecting your business to adapt in real time in the face of uncertainty and move fast in the age of digital.

It’s a bit like Lego

Composable business champions four principles: modularity, autonomy, orchestration and discovery. Modularity refers to dividing the business into smaller business functions that can be independently created, modified, replaced or exchanged with each other. Autonomy, then, is that ability for each function to work independently. Orchestration is that ability to dynamically respond and adapt, modifying or rearranging the business functions to achieve outcomes and create value. And discovery is the ability to sense or discover when change needs to happen.

The idea behind this approach is for businesses to be able to rearrange quickly and easily to meet a new demand or disruption.

It might be helpful to think of the concept as a collection of Lego blocks. If you want to build a Lego aeroplane, you’ll know which Lego blocks in your collection to use and bring together. If you want to change that aeroplane into a bus, you’ll know which pieces to remove or rearrange, without having to tear it all down unnecessarily and build it from scratch. Lego is always ready to be whatever you need it to be.

Composable business during COVID-19

We’ve seen plenty of examples of composable business in action during the current pandemic. In countries like Kenya, for example, the closing of non-essential shops temporarily slowed demand for clothing items. However, the world couldn’t source PPE fast enough to protect frontline workers. And so, some apparel manufacturers adjusted their production lines and sourced new materials to start producing surgical masks and medical-grade gowns. Similarly, in South Africa, a nationwide alcohol ban saw South African Breweries produce alcohol-based hand sanitizer instead.

The benefit was that, instead of operations running dry, these organizations were able to capitalize on an opportunity, pivoting fast to fulfil another pressing need, add value and continue generating income.

Isn’t this just agility?

Composable business goes a step further than agility, because it’s more proactive. Instead of adapting a current business model when the need arises, it’s intentionally designing or building a business that’s continually ready and looking for opportunities to adapt at speed and scale. Because the new normal is likely to be one of constant change, such a setup will become significant in surviving and thriving.

As Gartner says: “The more these composable business ideas are integrated within your business model, the more flexibility and agility your organization will have.”

Disruption will never again phase you. It will only inspire you.

Technology the enabler

Technology can play an important role in enabling composable business, in a number of ways. In the discovery phase, for example, data insights and analytics can help businesses sense change and predict new behaviour faster, so that they can respond more rapidly and outperform the competition. The cloud can also help businesses unlock new revenue streams quickly.

For this reason, Gartner believes that composable business is a natural acceleration of digital business. And they have urged CIOs to expand their IT strategy beyond digitisation, to focus on technology and IT-enabled processes that are composable and can be reconfigured quickly. Those already doing so are seeing a greater return on their existing digital investments – and are now looking to go further.

What are your thoughts on composable business? I’d love to hear them.