The enterprise of the future is composable. Does your enterprise have a composable platform strategy?
Kapil Kurian Jacob
ServiceNow Evangelist | Technology Strategist | Solution Consulting Leader | Strategic Global Partnerships
** The views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer **?
How many times have you seen this scenario play out at home? Your toddler wants to build a house. A few minutes later he or she wants to build an aircraft and then a robot. To cater to the changing play needs of the child, parents’ resort to a brand that stands out among the rest - LEGO. The name LEGO is an abbreviation of leg godt which means "play well" in Danish and "I put together" in Latin. The fundamental premise of this toy is that it offers a “System of Play” where in children and adults can assemble and construct various structures using the Lego blocks with the only limit being their imagination.
What do Lego Blocks have anything to do with the enterprise of the future?
Just like the constant new toy demands of a toddler, modern enterprises constantly see an accelerated pace of business change. These enterprises may be looking to exploit new market opportunities or deliver better experiences. They may be reacting to the increasing pace of innovation or responding to competitive disruption. To better deliver on new business opportunities, enterprises need to be agile. They need to adapt and respond faster than ever. How ?
The answer is that the enterprise needs applications that can be assembled, reassembled, and extended. In essence, enterprises need to digitally transform to become “composable”.
Gartner’s Definition: A composable digital business applies the core principles of composability (modularity, autonomy, orchestration, and discovery) to the foundations of its business architecture (the business model, enterprise operations, and strategy) in order to master the risk of change and reach untapped business value.
There are three key characteristics of composable business:
Composable business architecture is a framework to maximize the ability to build, assemble, and reassemble different business elements for the digital era. Business elements that can be composed include products, services, responses, experiences, and organizations.
Composable thinking comes from a belief that anything is composable. It leads to a culture that emphasizes the assembly and reassembly of components as the fastest, most flexible path to outcomes. It is built on a system that enables anyone (employee, customer, partner) to compose, not only consume or contribute. The concepts of “citizen developer” and “citizen data scientists” dovetail well into the concept of composable thinking.
Composable technologies are digital assets packaged as discrete components that deliver independent, clear, and complete business value. The assets are thus designed as building blocks for the assembly and reassembly of business processes and application experiences. The core of composability is the concept of a PBC. These are self-contained entities that provide a business capability. PBCs contain microservices, internal data and metadata, APIs, event channels and (optionally) a user interface.
With this understanding, let us look at how ServiceNow can be a composable technology platform for the enterprise of the future. There are 4 aspects that come into consideration when we look at composable enterprise applications
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PBCs are encapsulated software components that represent a well-defined business capability, recognizable as such by a business user.
Fully expressed (autonomous) PBCs wholly and exclusively encapsulate the function and data of their designated business object. How can we relate this to ServiceNow ? Purpose-built products catering to specific business functionality such as ITSM, CSM, HRSD, etc. These products encapsulate relevant business functionality together as a single OOTB package.
Orchestration PBCs encapsulate a process. How can we relate this to ServiceNow? Order Management Workflow is one example of many such. By itself, it's just one process in a larger business scenario.
?Basic business function PBCs represent a software-encapsulated business capability (as, by definition, does every other type of PBC), but it does not attempt to achieve completeness of data modeling. How can we relate this to ServiceNow? Consider a single use case in a product like FSO. Eg. requests for new cards , increasing or decreasing credit limits
Composed Application Experiences: These are application services delivered to business users, assembled from selected PBCs, and then wrapped in a user experience (UX) to reflect the specific responsibilities of the user and their role. How can we relate this to ServiceNow? Configurations on the platform allow one to set up persona-based UX such as workspaces etc. which provide a contextual application experience based on the type of user - IT, employee, or customer.
An application composition platform is a collection of development and runtime tools that enables business technologists, IT professionals, and business users to collaborate on the design, composition, and recomposition of application experiences. It is, therefore, a combination of professional code, low-code, and no-code tools for composition, integration, orchestration, new development, runtime execution, and management of composed application experiences. A fully featured application composition platform combines multiple specialized capabilities and is typically assembled from multiple platform products. How can we relate this to ServiceNow? All capabilities listed in the below link map directly to this aspect. ServiceNow Implementors have the ability to pick and choose specific platform capabilities to design and build specific and contextual application experiences.
Data Fabric - Analytical insight and universal access to data resources for reference and machine learning (ML) have become central to facilitating rapid and intelligent context-aware operations and decision-making. Data fabric offers a consolidated strategy for providing access to otherwise fragmented and incompatible data models of business applications.
How can we relate this to ServiceNow? The common services data model (CSDM) within ServiceNow provides prescriptive guidelines for service modeling within the ServiceNow? Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The ServiceNow CMDB utilizes a single, shared data model with common processes, standard taxonomy, and pre-negotiated semantics, format, and quality standards for exchanged data. As a result, every table, view, and application built on the Now Platform leverages a consolidated, single system of record. This data model is also easily extensible: out-of-the-box tables and views can be extended with a click; fields from other tables can be referenced and used to drive workflow; and data validation and normalization rules ensure that trusted data can be leveraged across any application, form, or workflow.
Most enterprises that are digitally transforming themselves to be future-ready have already embraced ServiceNow as part of their composable enterprise strategy. Are you ready to "play well"?