Insights from the Boye and Co digital leadership conference

Recently, Squiz had the chance to attend the Boye and Co digital leadership conference in Aarhus, Denmark. The event was an excellent opportunity to learn about the latest trends in digital strategy, web architecture, and the Sisyphean task of meeting audiences' expectations. Here are our two big takeaways:?

Is composable architecture suitable for you??

Organisations are modernising their web architecture in a way that has a focus on composability. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of composability, essentially, it refers to the ability to mix and match different modular pieces of tooling so you can provide the digital experiences audiences expect. A composable model contrasts the traditional monolithic approach where everything is provided in one platform.?

This approach has several advantages, including increased flexibility, experimentation, improved time-to-market, and in some cases reduced costs.?

Delegates at the conference did raise some interesting challenges that organisations are experiencing when moving to a composable model.?

1. Teaching an old dog new tricks: The mindset of component content is hard for some content editors to get their heads around. "Our editors put all of the content into the same field". This inhibits the reusability of content snippets across channels.?
2. Removal of editorial preview: The further organisations move to a personalised first, the further content editors are removed from the front-end experience. Digital teams must ensure there is a way for content editors to preview a page in the context of the audience.?
3. Debugging: When something goes wrong, finding the weak link in the system can be challenging. We heard stories of the administrative overhead of bringing multiple vendors into a war room to find the issue. For some organisations, having one vendor to diagnose and remediate the error is more efficient.?
4. SaaS cost creep: Composable architecture is cheap except when it isn't. Keep a handle on all of those subscriptions.?

Gartner notes, "Currently, the proportion of organisations opting to assemble digital experiences from multiple composable components is roughly equal to the amount choosing to purchase a monolithic solution from a single vendor."?

Watch Squiz co-founder and executive chairman, John-Paul Syriatowicz, discuss the digital experience challenge and the concept of composability when moving away from CMS to a digital experience platform (DXP). Hear from Gavin Dumsday, showing how Squiz enables customers to "Come as you are" with the world's most composable DXP

Sustainable? UX and Web Design

The concept of sustainability was a common thread across many talks, but none more so than the keynote presentation by Thorsten Jonas, Founder of the Sustainable UX playbook . Good sustainable design will not only?reduce CO2 production,? it will have a holistic benefit for other areas of society, such as equity and ethics.?

We also heard from the team behind herning.dk - Denmark's first carbon-friendly municipal website. It's up to the user whether to take advantage of the climate-friendly display, making it possible for the citizen to save 30-70% of the data during a visit to the site.

At Squiz, we've invested ￡2m on infrastructure improvements over the last 18 months focused on lowering the emissions we create through computer server usage. However, there is still much more we can do going forward..

In summary

Composability and sustainability are themes that marketing and IT teams need to keep front and centre when moving forward with digital transformation strategies.?We’d love to hear how your organisation is tackling these topics. How do you know which step to make next? How do you benchmark yourself? Comment below!?

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