Gartner Keynote: The Future of Business Is Composable

When COVID-19 hit and Australia went into lockdown, many people lost their jobs. The result was a surge in welfare applications to Services Australia, which provides health, child support and welfare services to 25 million citizens.

There were so many applications, the site crashed. 

But Services Australia rapidly pivoted to accommodate this surge in demand and made changes to how it traditionally operated. They shifted in-person appointments to phones or online, deployed voiceprint technology to 1.2 million users and saw a 600% increase in the use of digital assistants to orchestrate fast responses. 

“ Composable business means creating an organisation made from interchangeable building blocks”

The organisation created resilience via the principles of composable business—a key feature of a successful business in 2020 and beyond—that enabled the agency to provide a safety net for citizens in need. 

“Composable business is a natural acceleration of the digital business that you live every day. It allows us to deliver the resilience and agility that these interesting times demand”, said Daryl Plummer, Distinguished VP Analyst, during the opening keynote at virtual Gartner Symposium IT/Xpo®. “We are talking about the intentional use of ‘composability’ in a business context—architecting your business for real-time adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty.”

Composable means modularity 

The pandemic highlighted vulnerabilities in businesses models that for years focussed on efficiency. Organisations that were once efficient suddenly became fragile at a time when they needed to be flexible. Businesses that were smart pivoted to a more modular setup, creating a composable business. Organisations were prepared for one type of future, but now must plan for multiple futures.

Read more: 7 Macro Factors That Will Shape the 2020s

Composable business means creating an organisation made from interchangeable building blocks. The modular setup enables a business to rearrange and reorient as needed depending on external (or internal) factors like a shift in customer values or sudden change in supply chain or materials. 

The 4 principles of composable business

The idea of composable business operates on four basic principles: 

• More speed through discovery
• Greater agility through modularity
• Better leadership through orchestration 
• Resilience through autonomy

This type of thinking enables a business to survive, and even flourish, in times of great disruption. From a technical perspective, this type of composability is not new to CIOs. It exists in familiar technology, from APIs to containers. But it is a new, or perhaps ignored, idea for a CIO’s business counterparts and board of directors. Composable business requires a foundational change in business thinking, architecture and technology. 

The building blocks of composable business

The three building blocks of composable business are: 

• Composable thinking, which keeps you from losing your creativity. Anything is composable. When you combine the principles of modularity, autonomy, orchestration and discovery with composable thinking, it should guide your approach to conceptualising what to compose, and when.
• Composable business architecture ensures that your organisation is built to be flexible and resilient. It is about structure and purpose. These are structural capabilities—giving you mechanisms to use in architecting your business.
• Composable technologies are the tools for today and tomorrow. They are the pieces and parts, and what connects them all together. The four principles are product design goals driving the features of technology that support the notions of composability.

When combined with the principles, the building blocks of composable business enable organisations to pivot quickly. For example, a Chinese appliance manufacturer pivoted from making dishwashers and wine coolers to distributing critical medical equipment during the pandemic. The company flexed beyond its core competencies, listened to what customers needed at the time and used its platform to move from an idea to a product launch. 

“ The building blocks of composable business enable organisations to pivot quickly”

The more these composable business ideas are integrated within your business model, the more flexibility and agility your organisation will have. That means faster response time and more consistency in execution for this new type of business setup.