MACH to the future: composing your digital transformation

The need for businesses to be agile is more important than ever before. Market uncertainty, emerging technologies, and the rise of digitally native competitors has made it essential for businesses to be able to adapt at speed. MACH is the technology approach that delivers the modularity and flexibility needed for businesses to succeed.

Businesses are facing waves of social, economic, and technological change. New capabilities are emerging from Edge Computing and GenAI to Web3 and Spatial Computing. Customer expectations continue to rise across both the B2C and B2B space, with audiences looking for tailored omnichannel experiences and always-on access to services. Now, more than ever before, business need to be able to adapt, and to do so at speed.

One of the biggest challenges facing businesses that are looking to change is their lack of agility. Capabilities are delivered by legacy, monolithic systems that are hard to update or add to. Teams operate with a fire and forget mentality, launching new capabilities and channels with no support to evolve them. ?Governance models place all decision-making power in the hands of a small executive group, creating bottlenecks in approving changes.

A new approach is needed.

Composable is growing in popularity across sectors as a mindset and architecture to introduce agility into businesses, powering growth, augmenting experiences, and accelerating time to market. In composable, organizations move away from monoliths to a modular approach, where each capability is delivered through an independent component. Capabilities can be easily added, removed, or swapped out, from Commerce and Search to AI tools and CDPs.

MACH is an architectural pattern to deliver composability, where each capability is based on the principles of Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. As the?MACH Alliance?puts it: “Every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and can be continuously improved through agile development to meet evolving business requirements.”

Defining your MACH capabilities

Incrementally advancing your capabilities can deliver value, but it won’t create the innovation and differentiation that true transformation can bring. When embarking on a change journey, you should certainly assess your current capabilities and any immediate gaps, but you should also look to the future. Define a Digital North Star, a vision for where you want to be in 5-10 years time and the capabilities required to support that vision. Then work backwards to the current state, exploring how a MACH architecture can be used to support the transition from the as-is to the to-be, adding new capabilities and MACH vendors over time to move you to that North Star.

Today there are MACH vendors supporting multiple capabilities, including:

·??????Content Management: Contentful, Contentstack

·??????Commerce: commercetools, Big Commerce

·??????Front-end: Vue Storefront, Vercel

·??????Experience management: Uniform, Amplience

·??????Search: Algolia, Bloomreach

·??????Order management: Fluent commerce, One Stock

·??????DAM: Cloudinary, Tenovos

·??????PIM: Akeneo, Bluestone PIM

·??????Loyalty: Talon.One

·??????Payments: Ayden, Stripe

Other key capabilities are not yet fully MACH supported, such as ERPs. It will be an important and necessary step for the vendors behind these capabilities to make their processes available at a far more granular level than before, even if they don’t fully embrace a MACH approach.

When planning your transformation, ensure you consider how MACH capabilities will need to integrate with some non-MACH components, and any limitations that may bring.

Enabling MACH with your operating model

It’s not enough just to have the right technology; you also need the right people and processes to make use of it.

With a MACH architecture, you’ll need to ensure you have a broader skill set in development teams to manage the components from different vendors. You should also consider establishing more delivery teams, as with a MACH approach you can work on multiple capabilities in parallel. This is where a Digital Factory model can be of use, defining a set of independent value streams or products. Each of these has an owner and one or more scrum teams to maintain and update a specific set of capabilities, providing autonomy and agility. However, an overarching governance layer across all the streams/products should also be introduced to ensure consistency and adherence to global rules and guidelines.

Processes must be defined to manage not only the work within a capability, but also to consider the relationship between capabilities. For instance, the team responsible for a CDP may identify new customer segments, but to create value from these the teams looking after content management, experience management, and content creation will need to be aware of these segments and plan them into their own content and targeting processes.

With separate teams responsible for each capability, there is also a risk of pulling in opposite directions. The priority backlog items for one team may not align with the priorities of another, leading to new features that can’t be fully leveraged across the value chain. To mitigate this risk, consider introducing shared KPIs across stream/product teams with incentives aligned to these, to ensure teams are all charting a course for the same destination.

Creating your MACH Business case and Roadmap

By its nature, MACH considers capabilities as separate components that could be introduced or changed at different times. Each of these components will drive business value as well as carrying costs to establish and run. The sooner each component lands, the faster the time to value. However, there are other considerations. There will be a limit to how much funding your business can release for transformation work over a given period. CFOs will want to see results before committing to the full amount. If you’re migrating from a monolith to MACH, there are existing dependencies and risks involved, which require careful planning in the order of shifting capabilities. Your business may also have strategic priorities that require particular capabilities to be in place sooner than others.

All of these factors raise the importance of having an integrated roadmap and business case, one in which you can model the cost, value, and timings of each component both separately and in aggregate. You need to be able to explore different way paths to see the impact different approaches may have on the final business case, whether taking a more risk averse or bolder route, whether prioritising early value over higher up-front cost, or whether looking to release capabilities incrementally or with a big bang.

This is even more important for a business with multiple BUs or regions, each of which may have different capability needs and priorities, where every component could deliver a different degree of value. Here, you not only need to consider cost, value, and complexity at a capability level, but also for each capability against each BU/market. Planning from the start for flexibility in your business case modelling can pay dividends when it comes to running the numbers and adjusting the roadmap.

Orchestrating a MACH transformation

Bringing all these different facets together can be a challenging undertaking. It’s why you should take an integrated approach to defining and managing the transformation. Consider the different lenses of technology, data, experience, and business throughout the process. Ensure that the business need for each MACH capability is understood and quantified, that the impact and ask it will place on people and processes is documented, and that the integrations between new and existing capabilities are considered carefully.

With the right approach, MACH can bring significant value to your business, whether it’s enabling you to role out across multiple new markets at speed, improving software performance to drive conversion rates, or supporting automated scaling of capabilities when customer value spikes.

MACH can take your future vision and make it real.