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Uniform blog/Uniform’s stance on composability
Uniform’s stance on composability
Uniform’s stance on composability
Given the differing opinions about “headless” and “composable,” and since Uniform is one of the vendors pioneering composable approaches, we are often asked about our stance on composability.
We believe that composability evolved in two separate—but related—tracks:
- The business side, whereby organizations seek to quickly differentiate their operations and customer experience.
- The technical side, which boils down to choosing technologies to support composable.
- More speed through discovery
- Greater agility through modularity
- Better leadership through orchestration
- Resilience through autonomy
In addition, Gartner cites the pandemic as an excellent example of composable businesses being able to adapt by adding channels for delivery. However, adaptability is achievable only if the underlying practices and technology are composable and capable of harnessing the related benefits, notably the flexibility to easily add or change underlying systems, such as adding cart and inventory-management capabilities to bricks-and-mortar retail operations.
Nonetheless, building a composable architecture is hard work, and sometimes the tools involved complicate the process. You can be headless without being composable, depending on the answer to Gartner’s observations above, i.e., how easy is it to actually connect and work with all the separate systems?
Four factors are at play:
- Discovery. If you can’t readily find and reuse content and customer data from other systems, your headless systems are at risk of becoming structured silos.
- Modularity. If you can’t easily swap systems out to ensure standardization and abstraction of the underlying data format, building on APIs is meaningless.
- Orchestration. Since the key to creating consistent, omnichannel experiences is being able to easily build on discovery and modularity, you must be able to encourage reuse and remixing of multiple sources for multiple channels.
- Autonomy. A major challenge with headless is the need for different teams to work in lockstep with one another. For example, to update components or visual layouts on the front end, marketers need developer assistance. By separating the tasks of content creation, design, and development, you can remove bottlenecks, enabling teams to work independently and combining efforts later in the process.
In particular, marketers have struggled with the shift to headless due to the need to file IT tickets for developer help with updates. What follows are dependencies and pressure as developers rely on marketers’ insights for successful outcomes, and marketers rely on developers for technical solutions. Brands are promised success through speed and agility; instead, their team is mired in problematic scenarios with an uncertain future.
Within its digital experience composition platform (DXCP), Uniform addresses the gaps in disconnected headless systems and elevates the entire platform around the foundational principles of composability. Specifically:
Canvas offers a visual workspace for marketers to independently build and customize web and app experiences with any connected content source, which translates to discoverability and modularity. As a result, business users regain autonomy by being able to orchestrate content and data into compelling experiences across channels.
Mesh helps you achieve fast time to market, true composability, and freedom to add to your stack, as well as innovate without replatforming.
Context provides out-of-the-box tools and integrations for building data-driven experiences, including CRO and ABM campaigns, without copying and pasting.
To learn more about how Uniforms visual workspace can empower your teams to quickly blend content, data, and technology from anywhere to deliver winning multichannel experiences, request a demo today!
