With so many of us traveling again, airports and train stations are experiencing unprecedented delays and cancellations. I personally experienced this recently at the airport in Frankfurt. So, could there have been better ways to predict and handle the surge? The reality is most businesses are not built to adapt in real time and respond to market demands yet. The pandemic and other global crises have revealed how vulnerable and fragile current business models are to not only current demands, but future demands we can’t predict. I believe there is a better model to deal with this new reality - it’s called the Composable Enterprise. A #composable business is a business model that can react to change quickly. Composable businesses are agile and open to change and disruption. With software that can create composable business processes, customers can pick and pay according to their changing needs. I see enterprises becoming more composable and this needs to be reflected in software and how it can be consumed, adapted, maintained, and optimized. Enterprises that have #composability as a goal of their end-to-end processes can more easily find out about shifts in customer demands, re-orient, find new suppliers, or hire necessary skills. So instead of a very complex system with many customer-specific modifications, composable enterprises can integrate features and functions whenever you need them. Third-party services could provide information from air, railway, and road traffic in a plug-and-play fashion and react to unforeseen situations. You could add a new process alternative on-the-fly, e.g., by allowing an alternative mode of transportation and setting up an automatic reimbursement for the initially booked route. This unplanned process change – instead of a significant customization effort – would be as simple as "select, configure, run" within your business process - as quick as possible, as specific as necessary. Gartner (https://lnkd.in/eCmNrKHu) predicts that, by 2023, composable businesses will outpace their competition by 80%. What’s your take? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
I agree , Juergen. Composability is likely to be the next big things in IT. Glad to hear SAP is endorsing the composable enterprise. Composability-enabling technology stems from the convergence of low code, orchestrations and integration. From an application architecture perspective, it is the most mature manifestation of SOA and APIs. But the big deal is that composability fosters productive collaboration between business and IT. For the very first time business people and IT engineers can work together to design, develop and deliver applications and, most importantly, to manage their life cycle. The digital revolution transformed how IT supports the user experience. Composability will transform how the core system of record application are built and deployed and how their life cycle will be collaboratively managed by joint IT & business teams. Not only will composability determine the emergence of new application composition platform providers, but wil also transform the application vendors landscape and will redefine the mission of external service providers. If you haven’t looked into composability yet, hurry up!
Wolfram Jost
1y
Fast reaction to changing business conditions is the most important capability in the digital world. In uncertain times agility and adaptability are needed to survive. To execute on the idea of the Composable Enterprise you have to implement two things. A Composable Business Architecture (Processes, Teams, etc) and a Composable Application Architecture. The underlying technology is called an Application Composition Platform (ACP). The ACP is the next big thing in the Application Infrastructure space. The ACP combines capabilities which are today only available in single components. iPaaS, aPaaS, apiPaaS and bpmPaaS will be combined to one single platform. One tooling, one deployment, one run time, one monitoring and one administration. And of course an ACP is providing a Low Code experience. Low Code is not a capability, it is an experience. If you want to see a ACP in real live, have a look at Scheer PAS.
To support a Composable Business you need a Composable Application Landscape, and to build and develop such packaged business capabilities (PBC) you need an Application Composition Platform which combines Low/Pro Code, iPaaS, BPM, AI, RPA and Process Automation in one nimble, flexible and integrated tooling. Do you agree? Scheer PAS
Select, configure and run mechanism is old. Composable / Component-based / API based integration is old, we are doing this today the whole time. We need to skip Composable Business and go one step further. What we need: Describable Business. Describe and #automatically generate the apps / processes without someone selecting, configuring and running the apps / processes manually. With today AI, data orientation, code automation like #GitHub #Copilot #OpenAI #Codex we are getting there...
Pete Chapman
1y
Today’s software prevents “composable” business, because it creates software-centric data. Composable ecosystems (think beyond business boundaries) require data in a schema that transcends software limitations. Then SAP can own and license best-practice business processes without straight jacketing everything else.
I like this idea! In my view composable is a synonym for business modularity. When we think further, especially considering the challenges ahead, then business should start enacting “dynamic vanturing”. This could be the next level of maturity achieved for the sake of creating value.
This is a great concept Juergen Mueller! A couple of decades ago we would have fit all the variations in a ‘Procure to Pay’ process into 5-10 variants and standardised on them. Today we understand there are more than 100 variants with each one requiring different steps to reduce the cycle time and reduce rework. This requires we move the ability to configure business processes from consultants to ‘power users’. I visualise a #composable business as something configured by power users tweaking the standard processes to finer variants introducing/removing process steps as needed. #composablearchitecture will also help us innovate faster to address newer requirements such as sustainability, security, supply chain resilience etc. Looking forward to SAP innovations here!
Tobias Unger
1y
Composability is the new #standardization. As we have accepted that Business processes cannot be 80% fit to one standard. Composability means (a) more choice for solution fit to process and (b) faster time from select to run. At SAP Signavio we work hard to bring #process based composability to the next level. Robert Weller Rouven Morato
Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst and Research Fellow.
1yDear Juergen Mueller it’s great to see SAP recognize that digital agility is an imperative priority for a modern business. Composability can help when organizations have access to a curated catalog of useful, useable and reusable application components designed to match the skills and needs of business technologists and business-IT fusion teams. Is SAP prepared to deliver such catalog, pre-populated with reusable SAP application components and open for import of partner and customer add-ons? What tools will SAP provide to the creators of the building blocks, the curators of the catalog and the composers of the new adaptive applications?