Published on the 02/11/2022 | Written by Heather Wright

Complex, but powerful…

The world of composability provides ‘massive’ amounts of flexibility and adaptability, but it will also dramatically increase the complexity of your environment. 

That’s the warning from Marcus Blosch, Gartner VP analyst, who says when it comes to composability, companies need to start small. 

“Business architecture tells you what to build. Tech architecture tells you how to build it.”

“It’s a powerful approach, and it’s complicated. So what you want to do is look at your organsiation and look at where you can start, and typically, where you are going to start is in areas of high change – around the customer, around the product set.” 

Composability is the concept of creating businesses from interchangeable building blocks across business architecture, thinking and technologies. 

“Composability can be transformative,” Blosch says. “It allows you to change and change quickly, to be adaptive, to be contextual and adjustable.  

“If you don’t like this particular business model or operating model you can change it, and you can do that quickly and efficiently.” 

Blosch, speaking at Gartner’s IT Expo said there are three components to composability: 

• Context: Business architecture shapes what form or architecture emerges and is relevant 
• Architecture: Modules based on autonomy, orchestration and discovery 
• Modularity: Business entities are partitioned into a system of building blocks 

Elements of business composability, which Gartner has been pushing for several years now, are already practiced by many leading organisations, Blosch says.  

The 2022 Gartner CIO Survey found 43 percent of respondents said leaders at their organisation encouraged the creation and reuse of modular business capabilities and technologies. Forty percent said their organisations combined business elements such as capabilities, products and services in multiple ways to create new value, while 39 percent said the work of producing technology capabilities was modularised and automated using APIs, microservices and other modular components.  

Blosch noted an increasing shift away from projects to products, taking the responsibility for delivery of digital innovation into the business, and the rise of product teams.  

“To support that continuous iteration and delivery, we need composable architecture,” he says.  

But composability isn’t just on the technology side. It happens within the business architecture as well as in the technical architecture.  

“Business architecture tells you what to build. Technology architecture tells you how to build it. So the two always have to work in close combination. Business architecture is essential to composability because it is telling us what to build.” 

Done right, architecture is a form of ‘internal management consulting’, Blosch says.  

“Because business architecture is about working with stakeholders to help understand what is it you’re trying to achieve, what outcomes are you’re driving, and then being able to represent that in a way that we can execute off it.” 

The organisation’s business model, strategy and goals and operating model, along with the ecosystem and service models and economic and financial models will all provide the framework at the heart of business architecture to create a blueprint for what is required.  

“The role of business architecture in this consulting role is to identify and clarify business outcomes, take vision into something that we can execute off,” he says. 

“It’s about helping stakeholders make smart decisions, it’s using a toolbox of business architecture in a flexible way to work with those stakeholders to create that design, defining those business outcomes and then providing the bridge between what the business is trying to achieve and then what do we do with technology.” 

By using business architecture, fusion teams can focus on building adaptive applications that target changing business outcomes. 

Those fusion teams too will be different requiring key roles, including ‘connectors’ – the business architects working with the business team to identify business architecture and make sure it all fits together – creators managing the portfolio of building blocks and composers working to understand where the building blocks are and how to put them together.  

“The idea is our landscape, our complexity, is going up, and we want to make sure we construct the components we need, we want to make sure we manage and orchestrate the delivery of those components and we want to be able to manage the complexity of our environment.” 

Customer experience maps and customer journey mapping will also prove critical in composability as will understanding the business capabilities coming across the customer journey.
“From that we can understand the underlying process, so we have logic, we have the process, we have the flow, we can then identify the individual technology components we need to execute that and then we can put it all together. 

“And because this is composable architecture we have a whole bunch of business technology lego bricks so next time you want to upgrade service, around we go again, and it works really fast and really efficiently,” he says. 

“Look at areas where you can start that are high change and you know this approach will add value.  

“Begin there, develop a composable approach to business architecture and technology architecture and then iterate and get it right, get your level of skills and experience up, deliver the solution, do it again and expand the approach, and what you will find is that you will expand this composable approach into those high change areas. 

“Just begin at the shallow end and work your way into the deep end step by step.”