Plug and play companies
Agile is hot! Everybody wants to be agile. Companies want to be agile. So what will organizations look like in the near agile future?
Forbes Insights and Mule Soft recently published an article entitled "The rise of the composable enterprise".
Their definition of a "composable enterprise" is an organization whose business processes are highly linked to on-demand services from an external supplier or internal data centers. These small, lightweight services are the building blocks which are connected to other parts of a system through API's. An API (or Application Programming Interface) is a set of definitions that enables software programs to communicate with each other. It automatically gives each other access to information and/or functionality without developers having to know how the other program works exactly. There is great economic power in API's.
Popular API's are for example Facebook login, Google calendar and Google maps, Twitter tweets, LinkedIn, PayPal transactions, Pinterest, Weather channel, TripAdvisor and much more. New API's will include applications for face and image recognition, text analysis, sentiment analysis, language translation, prediction and other machine learning. The collection of API's is growing fast.
Either if companies develop API's themselves or "buy" the API's from other providers, it is clear that the IT and business landscape of a company will be composed of building blocks, that can be adjusted and scaled as needed. It is "easy" to add a new service to your business with an existing API. It is almost as easy as plug and play.
It's an interesting idea and a logical development. API's themselves are nothing new, but the need for organizations to become more agile and be able to respond quickly to the market will ensure that many of the large, bulky, monolithic systems will be replaced by small block-like services that are clicked together.
Internet of Things is one of the driving forces behind this. All those connected devices provide small services and data streams that are used by companies for various purposes. The Orange bus and train API, for example, can return real-time information about buses and trains such as vehicle type, vehicle description, and location.
In the new economy, success depends partly on the speed with which we can not only develop new services but also use new services from other providers.
I believe most companies, in the end, will move to these composable building blocks. Many large companies are still restrained in their business agility because of the monolithic IT architecture. The will have to move to a more service-oriented architecture: Essential applications and functions as scalable, reusable, loosely coupled services. Microservices ensure the granularity needed to adapt to key business functions. For many companies, this is an expensive move, but at some point in time, it will be done. The good news is that you can change this architecture little by little, as you would develop any other agile project.
Ross Mason, founder and VP of product strategy of MuleSoft said: “The web is the playbook for the composable enterprise. It taught us that you can decouple very complex systems with simple interfaces called APIs; as long as you make them usable, and you think about the consumer of those interfaces, they can drive enormous value. API's have shown us that every business, no matter how different and complicated it is perceived to be, has technology components that can be broken down into smaller, composable pieces that can be consumed by the business.”
A great example of business agility is the New Zealand Post. They responded to the changing postal business by focusing on other services such as address verification and tracking services. All services are provided through APIs, including payment.
References:
Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/forbesinsights/mulesoft/index.html
Mulesoft: The rise of the composable enterprise
Photography (composable): Forbes Insights