Why composability matters in digital experience

When times get tough, the tough get innovative. From a global pandemic to rapid inflation to economic uncertainty, business leaders have navigated their fair share…

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Greg Dierickse

March 3, 20234 minutes read

When times get tough, the tough get innovative. From a global pandemic to rapid inflation to economic uncertainty, business leaders have navigated their fair share of curve balls in recent years. Digital transformation is moving faster than ever but at the same time, it will never move this slowly again.  

Thousands of micro-experiences occur every second. According to IDC, worldwide data will grow to 175ZB by 2025. It’s doubling every three years, and 30% of this data is real-time information.  

A minute on the internet

231.4 million emails and 16 million texts, 5.9 million Google searches, 1.7 million Facebook posts shared, 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube and a million hours streaming1 

It’s not just speed and size but requires focus and agility to be customer centric. Businesses face a complex task: acquiring customers, retaining them and cultivating loyalty becomes more challenging every day. Customer expectations are rising while budgets trend in the opposite direction. What’s a savvy digital leader to do?

What is a composable digital experience?

Enter composability – a term that describes two concepts: 

  1. Building highly personalized experiences that can be easily adapted to market and customer changes 
  1. Building a martech stack or experience platform in a composable way – assembling what you need to be adaptable to your team’s specific needs 

The best way to explain composability is to imagine Lego pieces. The options are endless and easy-to-use: you can build exactly what you want by choosing and connecting pieces. Lego helps kids solve problems, develop creativity, communicate ideas and collaborate with peers. Similarly, composable digital architecture or experiences enable businesses to compete in a crowded marketplace with more agility and speed.  

It’s not just child’s play – adopting a composable digital experience helps the bottom line. This is because there are no heavy commitments with vendors like how there are in a monolithic architecture environment. Composable digital experience platforms can integrate new features and tools with existing applications, allowing faster time-to-market.

Composable experiences include communications, websites, portals, interactive applications and much more. When experiences are built and delivered to the end-users with components, templates, data and interactive code, experiences can be highly personalized, localized to unique geographic needs and can test variants to optimize. Composability thinking is the key to unlocking experiences that will respond to business needs: the constant change, size and flexibility required to continuously innovate. Composable design allows teams to plan for experiences that are built like Lego blocks – quickly understand what pieces need to be personalized, tested, updated, optimized, re-used and brand controlled. Composable experiences allow teams to:  

  • Personalize at scale using composability 
  • Test and run experiments using composability 
  • Meet unique market and brand needs – swapping things out and pivot messaging to respond quickly changing conditions 

Why is tech-stack composability important?

Composability is one of the biggest trends in the digital experience space. Next generation platforms feature a composable architecture foundation layer through which all the data, systems and fundamental infrastructure for the delivery of digital engagements can sit upon. OpenTextTM Experience Cloud supports a composable approach by bringing together tools for creating, managing and using content, experiences, communications and digital assets. It offers a pattern and not a prescription for modernization, allowing customers to select best-of-breed options to fit in their existing marketing technology stack.  

What are the benefits of taking a composable approach?

A composable digital experience allows users to deploy only what they need, when needed – enabling quicker time-to-market and allowing businesses to react to changing market conditions. It allows a blend of new and legacy technology that goes further than just integrations into UX and how the tools work together. The sharing of data and content are often seen as drivers of composability. Marketers can provide relevant, always-on experiences for customers with consistency across channels and devices.

Modernize for data-driven experiences

Learn more about the role composability plays in modern experiences.

  1. Statista, 2023.

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Greg Dierickse avatar image

Greg Dierickse

Greg Dierickse has been helping customers improve their digital experiences for over 20 years, including roles as product and marketing manager at Dell EMC, HP, and Oracle. Greg uses his first-hand experience running web and digital marketing teams to better understand the diverse requirements for customers, partners and employees. Previously, Greg has worked in Canada, United States, Singapore and Shanghai, and applies a global mind-set to unique customer journeys.

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