Gartner first coined the term' composable commerce' in 2020. Since then, many have tried to explain what it is and why you need it. With hundreds of articles online, there's been a lot of oversimplification of Gartner's report, which stated that "by 2023, organisations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation". Rene points out that many need to realise that Gartner's widely cited statement was an assumption, not fact-based.
What made Gartner so confident about this new approach? While Gartner coined the term' composable commerce', it wasn't a new concept. Gartner rebranded the concept of a microservice architecture.
Composable commerce is a rebranding of a loosely coupled microservice architecture
Capabilities like add-to-cart, content management, payment management, and order management are all microservices. These capabilities are too big to be called a 'microservice', so Gartner named them 'packaged business capabilities' (PBC). By combining PBCs, you get a composable platform. What's another word for combining microservices? A microservice architecture.
Rene uses a puzzle analogy to explain microservices: "Imagine your entire platform is made up of jigsaw pieces. Each piece represents a capability, such as add-to-cart or order management. If you want to remove one of those pieces, you can replace it with another piece of the same shape. A loosely coupled architecture helps you become more agile and flexible in delivering software features and capabilities. It's easier to replace underperforming pieces."
The benefits of loosely coupled architecture
Google's 2023 State of DevOps Report compiles the voices of 36,000 professionals worldwide. The report outlines "the DevOps practices that drive successful software delivery and operational performance, with a deep focus on user-centric design". Their findings show a loosely coupled architecture results in huge benefits, including:
Substantial increase in team performance
Substantial decrease in burnouts
Substantial increase in organisational performance
Substantial increase in job satisfaction
Substantial increase in operations performance
Substantial increase in productivity
A minor increase in software delivery performance
What to consider before ‘going composable'
Rene says this correlation isn't accidental; It's a causal relationship that proves a loosely coupled architecture yields significant benefits. While 'going composable' is a good choice for many, it has risks. There are three things to consider before starting the composable journey.
Headless doesn't mean no UI
"Headless architecture represents a specific type of decoupled user interface that is untethered from underlying, back-end business and application logic", says TechTarget.
But Rene says 'headless architecture' doesn't mean you don't have a user interface (UI); it simply means you're not strongly coupled to one. You can have as many UIs as you need to support your business. The phrase' headless architecture' can be misleading because it really means having many 'many heads'—which is the whole point of adopting a headless strategy.
Define your path to transformation
Before starting the journey from monolithic to composable, you must consider how you'll get there. Gartner cites 'the strangler fig pattern', which was observed by Martin Fowler as a way to manage risk when modernising or rewriting large, monolithic systems. It's a transformation approach that allows you to "gradually create a new system around the edges of the old, letting it grow slowly over several years until the old system is strangled", says Martin Fowler.
Retain control over the presentational layer
One of the main benefits of a headless approach is that business users can make quick frontend executions and curate customer experiences without needing to code. Yet early adopters of headless approaches mistakenly put developers in control of the presentational layer. While this can speed up development, it denies business users the capability to make changes themselves. This "leads to slower progress because an easy change that a business user would have been able to do gets lost in a ticket queue or priority list with IT. IT teams tend to work on high impact or very urgent issues, so a "minor" frontend update is not going to top the list", says Rene.
Organisations with elite teams outperform competitors by magnitudes
Google's DORA team performs statistical analysis to extract the characteristics of elite teams in the software industry. The exact characteristics of an elite team change annually with new data. Still, in 2023, an elite team is defined by its ability to deploy code changes on demand, deploy code to production in less than one day, and recover from failure in less than one hour.
In 2019, 7% of the software industry earned elite performance status; in 2023, that figure jumped to 18%. Why should you care? The performance metrics they chose were a predictor of organisational performance. "These results show that high scores in these metrics cause high organisational performance, and low scores cause low performance. So, an elite team can be thought of as one that drives and causes high organisational performance", says Rene.
Frequency
Elite teams deploy code to production more frequently. In 2018, elite teams performed 46x more deployments than low-performing teams, jumping to 973x more in 2021.
Speed
Elite teams are faster than low-performing teams. In 2018, elite teams are 2555 times faster and 6570 times faster in 2023.
Recovery from failure
Elite teams recover from failure faster. In 2018, elite teams recovered 2604 faster; in 2021, the speed jumped to 6570 times faster.
Does your organisation boast an elite-performing team? "If you're not, someone is outperforming you by one hundredfold, if not more", says Rene.
A tech insider's words of wisdom
The best way to outperform your competitors? Rene says you should embrace technological advancements and strive for digital maturity. "There is no company today that doesn't use tech. We know that increased software delivery performance leads to better organisational outcomes. In other words, better software helps you accomplish your organisational goals", says Rene.
Steer clear of the urgency trap and invest in your tools and team. Rene says too many organisations invest resources into putting out fires. "These organisations never get anywhere. Instead of throwing all your money into that fire, invest in lasting positive change that can prevent those fires from happening. Don't put resources into temporary solutions to temporary problems. Create permanent, lasting change by investing in tech, tools and people. That's the path to evolution and digital maturity".