CIOs and IT leaders who use composability to deal with continuing business disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors will make their enterprises more resilient, more sustainable and make more meaningful contributions, according to
Gartner analysts said that composable business means architecting for resilience and accepting that disruptive change is the norm. It supports a business that exploits the disruptions digital technology brings by making things modular - mixing and matching business functions to orchestrate the proper outcomes. It supports a business that senses - or discovers - when change needs to happen; and then uses autonomous business units to creatively respond.
According to the 2021 Gartner Board of Directors survey, 69% of corporate directors want to accelerate enterprise digital strategies and implementations to help deal with the ongoing disruption. For some enterprises that means that their digital strategies became real for the first time, and for others that means rapidly scaling digital investments.
"Composable business is a natural acceleration of the digital business that organizations live every day," said
During the opening keynote of Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Americas, which is taking place virtually today through Thursday,
"The world today demands something different from us. Composing - flexible, fluid, continuous, even improvisational - is how we will move forward. That is why composable business is more important than ever," said
"During the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, most CIOs leveraged their organizations existing digital investments, and some CIOs accelerated their digital strategies by investing in some of the three composable building blocks," said
Gartner analysts said that these four principles can be viewed differently depending on which building block organizations are working with:
In Composable Thinking, these are design principles. They guide an organization's approach to conceptualizing what to compose, and when.
In Composable Business Architecture, they are structural capabilities, giving an organization the mechanisms to use in architecting its business.
In Composable Technologies, they are product design goals driving the features of technology that support the notions of composability.
"In the end, organizations need the principles and the building blocks to intentionally make composability real," said
The building blocks of composability can be used to pivot quickly to a new opportunity, industry, customer base or revenue stream. For example, a large Chinese retailer used composability when the pandemic hit to help re-architect their business. They used composable thinking and chose to pivot to live streaming sales activities. They embraced social marketing technology and successfully retained over 5,000 in-store sales and customer support staff to become live streaming hosts. The retailer suffered no layoffs and minimal revenue loss.
"Throughout 2020, CIOs and IT leaders maintained their composure and delivered tremendous value," said
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