This article was originally written by Avanade alum Dave Moore

We’re all familiar with building block toys – those colourful plastic bricks that, when stacked and interlocked, turn into surprising structures that awe and delight. No matter the origin, these blocks of different shapes and sizes fit together in countless ways to continually spark excitement. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination.

Today, organizations focused on flexibility, scalability, speed and innovation are looking for a similar experience through their digital marketing efforts. They’re turning to a more modular, best-of-breed approach to achieve this agility, because like building block sets that are already constructed and fused together, there’s little, if any, agility with traditional monolithic platforms.

Composable digital experience platforms (DXPs), however, allow marketers to select only the components they want and combine them in a custom-built application that provides the right degree of functionality to improve personalization, ensure brand consistency and support omnichannel content. With composable technology stacks, organizations get a building block set of sorts to create this experience-first strategy. They can build their own configurations and rapidly deliver task-oriented capabilities that continually offer customers the digital, touchless experiences they expect. They become more resilient. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023, organizations that adopt an intelligent composable approach will outpace the competition by 80%.

Making the move from monolithic to composable
The beauty of replacing or decomposing monolithic DXP solutions in favour of composable DXP is that you don’t have to buy the whole platform. You can choose what best of breed components you need and what is most relevant to your organization. It also helps reduce your overall IT footprint and cost of ownership.

In order to move from a monolithic to a composable platform, we need to decouple the front end from the back end. This means we build a bespoke front-end layer using the latest technologies and consume the capabilities provided by the components of our DXP via “headless” APIs. This activity alone can deliver significant benefits to the performance, agility and overall cost of ownership of your platform.

Our headless digital experience (HDX) accelerator for Sitecore has proven to help organizations gain greater agility and independence over channel delivery. This approach allows marketing and IT professionals to quickly and continually improve performance and customer experiences in line with evolving market demands, like near real time personalization. Here’s what we recommend you do to embrace a composable future:

• Modernize your DXP technology stack by aligning your architectural and organizational strategy to the principles of composable business
• Increase your operational agility by replacing your DXP monolith with a composable architecture and planning a roadmap that focuses on an incremental and modular approach
• Future proof your digital experience stack by implementing granular, task-oriented packaged business capabilities that ensure faster time to market and better adoption of DXP

We’re already seeing the shift from monolithic to composable approaches from Sitecore with their recent acquisitions. Boxever, Moosend and Four51 are all composable by design and represent an exciting future for the Sitecore platform. We’re here to help organizations make the transition smoothly and efficiently, guiding them in creating a platform that fits their unique business needs and responds to their customers’ demands better and faster.

Need help deciding what building blocks suit your needs?
With our end-to-end technology expertise and commitment to an experience-first approach, Avanade helps organizations maximize the value from their technology investments. If you’d like to learn more about transitioning to composable DXP, explore our customer experience solutions or connect with me directly. We can discuss how to best design and deliver personalized experiences at speed and scale.

We will be focusing on these issues and other topics during the upcoming Sitecore Symposium event.