Digital failure RX: composability
In Tony Saldanha’s book, “Why Digital Transformations Fail” he wrote a small but enormous story about Amy Ingram, who he guessed was a personal assistant. The “Aha!” moment in this small story highlights why re-thinking technology and investing in change is urgent. Amy Ingram was an AI robot! Amy was indeed a personal assistant, and she was responding to emails intelligently, and moving along meeting scheduling. Tony hadn’t considered that Amy wasn’t human.
What does Amy the Personal Assistant robot have to do with Digital Transformation failure? Speed.
Technology is quickly changing all around us. Just think, the guy you see sitting at a laptop in a cafe could be writing code that will revolution how coffee farmers adapt to climate change. He could be making significant improvements to supply chains, or the operations at a large multinational. Disruption is happening all around us, change happens fast. If your business is waiting for the right time to upgrade existing technology — trying to maximise the use of an outdated technology stack — you’re losing.
Analogies can be annoying but since diets are popular hopefully this is relatable. Can you imagine having a kitchen full of foods that you now know are largely unhealthy, are aggravating your health problems, and are preventing you from achieving optimum health - but instead of ridding your kitchen of them, you plan to ‘use them up’ before replacing them them with healthy ones? If you did this, it would mean you are willing to sacrifice your health, possibly your happiness, definitely your goals – to save yourself from wasting the food in your cupboards because you’ve already wasted money on these self-defeating foods.
You can see the logic. There is logic. But compare that to the logic of immediately removing the obstacles and replacing them with new sources of nutrition that will immediately begin improving your health to help you to achieve your goals. Why waste more time and money on something that’s not going to deliver the results you want?
Staying on outdated technologies that aren’t capable of delivering the required or simply wanted results, are exactly what many businesses do. It might makes sense for depreciation of assets but it probably doesn’t make sense in terms of revenue or profit.
The problem many businesses face are that they look at programmes and projects that are mighty and highly transformative. And that view can’t help but slow down the process of change. And when change is happening fast, and is unpredictable in markets that are facing disruption, it is highly valuable to make fast incremental change. If you can adopt new technologies and put them into play, and demonstrate value — your digital transformation roadmap will keep becoming clearer. It will also become clearer that a competitive advantage is the ability to adapt your marketing technology stack to changes.
Now let me tell you why “composability” matters.
Moving to modern marketing and sales technologies takes time and money.
You need to be able to move and change as the market does…you might even want to get ahead of the curve.
You don’t want to get stuck architecting and negotiating a project that will take more than a years to completed when you can start delivering results in a couple of months.
Composability means you can take pieces of digital technology and put them together to form your digital experience platform. And you can add on it. Imagine a lego block is your CRM. To improve your understanding of customer you determine that the next best technology addition is a Customer Data Platform, followed by Digital Asset Management, followed by ecommerce, followed by improved Search and so on. Composability enables you to roadmap how you are building a Digital Experience Platform by roadmapping how you will transform and roll out new capabilities.
Composable technology isn’t just faster and smarter - it’s often a path of less resistance. It’s easier to get internal buy-in and approvals when their duration of projects is shorter and the time need to demonstrate value or ROI is shorter.
