Composable Mentoring Guild On YouTube

Now that more and more people are understanding Composable is a business and architecture change, more content is becoming available on YouTube. As such we have created the Composable Mentoring Guild YouTube channel to provide a place to go to get information on both concepts and various products and tools that support composable.  

To start we have some featured playlists and channels however in the coming months we will be holding webinars and producing our own content on Composable.  If you would like to host/co-host a webinar or be a part of one of our videos reach out to me and we can get it done.

If you have a topic you would like discussed or you are a partner that supports composable let us know so we can add your content and help let people know you are composable.

In case you are unaware we do have a LinkedIn Group as well.

Composable Business Examples

 We already use composable business processes already we just don't think of them that way. 

1. Accounting Ledgers

This was standardized long ago and we simply continue to use it. Business schools teach it and CAs and CGAs insist on it. They allow businesses to quickly determine profit or loss and revenue so they can pay taxes and report numbers to shareholders or owners and make changes to make more profit. Although what feeds the Ledger changes because we all understand the ledger it means anyone new you hire or obtain services from can read it and use it. 

2. Naming Convention 

Coders use them to name variables or methods, land surveyors used them to name streets 1st st 2nd st etc.  This means someone new could understand what was done and continue. Did you know some villages and families used naming conventions to name children? So in some villages if you knew the names of some of your ancestry a person who knew the Convention could finish the first names multiple generations up fairly accurately.

3. Estimates

Imagine you could estimate portions of your fixed rate projects in a more accurate way by starting with a standard list of tasks and average ranges of time taken? Some organizations do that now but don't share it. As people move from company to company parts do get shared. Conversations in the community can help with that too. Why not do this for your industry? Typically I hear "That is our competitive advantage" Yes to constantly lose money on fixed rate projects

However some industries do it already and do share it. Auto mechanics have a book of the avg time it takes to do repairs or replace parts. Some mechanics use the book and it is only their hourly rate that changes. Some makes and models take longer and some shorter but it averages out and they make money at it. 

Anyways to wrap it up. Take a look at places you already use composable that you didn't realize it. Also look for other places you could use composable solutions. Please share in the comments so others can learn and maybe do the same in their businesses.

Composable and Disruptions In Staffing

Over the past few years employers have struggled with disruption in access to knowledgeable staff there are many reasons for this:

1. Staff is getting Covid or is in contact with someone with Covid and has to quarantine.
2. Staff live in areas where there are wars or protests
3. Staff are burning out because they have to cover for others off for reasons 1 and 2 or just because the 20's have been a tough year for all of us.
4. There is a limited number of people worldwide trained and certified on the solutions you implement and support eg. you can only learn Sitecore if you have a license.

So let's deal with 1, 2 and 3.  In these instances you need a replacement(s) in a short timeframe and in most cases when you hire someone the disruption may have already left. How can composable help with that? Well let's breakdown the problem then if you find that interesting contact me and let's work on solutions together.

First let's look at the hiring process. You create a job post for the position, you plan calls with recruiters or post them on various places. Maybe after a week or so you connect with some people to interview. After many interviews you finally find the person to hire. This could take a week or maybe a month. Next look at onboarding, You get them to sign the contract and NDA which is probably a day turnaround but then you spend an entire week doing onboarding forms to fill out and make them watch compliance videos. Then after watching those videos then you get them access to everything and they set up there environments. There is also all the proprietary IT processes you must teach them like how to enter support tickets, access your bug tracker, get used to your branching strategy, the architecture of your solutions. The documentation and testing processes, all specific to your company.  

So once you hire a resource which could take up to a month then it takes probably another month before they are productive.  This is if they are already familiar with some of your platforms like they know Sitecore or Adobe, etc.

If this sounds familiar then you need to talk to me about composable and how you can make changes in your processes to reduce the hiring time and reduce the onboarding time.  

Email me at chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com or call me 9052208496 to discuss working together to apply composable to you business.

How to get to a Composable DXP?

Composable DXP

The buzzword of the town, Composable DXP is literally formed of two words: Composable and an acronym DXP. DXP stands for Digital Experience Platform whereas Composable means anything that can be composed of multiple of anything. So Composable DXP means a Digital Experience Platform that can be composed of multiple systems/architectures/processes instead of a one big system which has it all. 

Think of a DXP as a Car. Just like a car has brakes, clutch, a steering wheel, seats, tyres and many other parts, a Digital Experience Platform has components like CMS, Analytics, Forms, Media Library, Marketing Automation, Emails, etc. Now if the brakes of the car fail or the left rear tyre is out of order, we just replace these broken pieces instead of replacing the entire car right? This is only possible because car is a composable entity. It is composed of these parts instead of being just car with everything fixed in it. Since these parts are composable, they can be easily replaced with new ones when needed. 

How to get to a Composable DXP?

As the saying goes, "A Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step", getting to Composable DXP also can be achieved by taking baby steps towards it. The steps can be listed below:

1. Knowing your system: The first (and I believe the most important one too) step of almost any activity is knowing your own self. In this case, getting to know your own platform to the minute details. What it is, what it does, where we want to go with it. Until we cannot answer these questions, we might be able to do a lot of stuff without actually producing any worthwhile results. 

2. Divide and conquer: Another famous quote, "There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time". This holds true for most things in life, even for getting to a Composable DXP. It would be impossible to achieve the goal of a Composable DXP in a day or even in a sprint (usually two weeks). So what can be done is we can break the entire system into different pieces and start prioritizing which parts can be made composable and when. This way it would be easier to vision the goal as well as track progress.

3. Doing it: Once there is a plan of action and tasks prioritized, implementation for these changes can begin. This can be done the same way any feature is released, make the change in local, unit test it, push it in the higher environment then perform integration testing. What would matter is the change itself and the time to release it. For example, introducing Saleforce forms in the system might not be that arduous task as compared to say switching to OrderCloud from Sitecore Commerce. The latter would require months of planning before even starting it out.

4. Testing: One of the vital pieces, it is important to identify and test all the possible scenarios and issues that may occur after the change. Functional testing, regression testing as well as integration testing needs to be carried out for the best possible results and to avoid any unforeseen problems.

5. Analyzing the results: This step is dependent upon the implentation/change itself. Some tasks cannot be analyzed directly and thus it might be difficult or even impossible to see or track the results. Others like using Google Tag Manager for example are easier to check how they are perform and gauge the benefits from it. 

6. Repeating the tasks: In a constantly changing world, eveything has a finite lifespan. So it's important to constantly review the processes in place and replace it with the newer ones that perform better and produce better results compared to their predecessors. So again revisiting the platform from time to time, identifying the NPAs (Non Performing Assets) and replacing them with new ones is important. 

 

Conclusion: Composable DXP is definitely the way forward and the sooner we go towards achieving it, the better it would be. Saying it, it should not be done without proper analysis and planning. The end goal should be to have a stable, sustainable and a performing system.

Composable Business Parts Are Like Songs

 A song is played by different types of instruments such as percussion, string, vocal, brass, woodwind. Now consider if you wrote the string part for a guitar but on a given day you had a ukelele or a violin available instead. As the string musicians know how to read music for other string instruments they can adapt the part to suit their instrument. The song sounds different but you can tell it is the same song and it just works. 

Ok now let's look at traditional music vs jazz.  In traditional music you build up the full score then everyone plays it. The composers work together to write the lyrics and/or instrument parts but once written it is always played that way. With jazz someone comes with a basic idea and everyone finds the places they can contribute and collaborate and make it grow. Everything it's played you get a new variation but the basic idea is still the same. Think of traditional as waterfall and jazz as agile but whichever method is used you get a song that is recognized by hearing the name or key parts. The idea of composable is to make parts of your business that recognizable by people from other companies you hire or customers you acquire. Doing this saves time getting a new hire or customer or vendor set up. 

Some niches are already doing this. The Sitecore community uses helix architecture. You have probably heard about jamstack or Mach. You may remember hearing about ISO. There are many more. 

Please comment on this post sharing as many as you know so we can start the conversation and help others find standards they could start using to make their businesses more composable. I will provide more examples if composable processes in the next blog post. 

Don't Boil The Ocean

I have been reading a lot of articles and talking to a bunch of people about Composable and I keep hearing the same complaints. 

• This is a big change and it will take us anywhere from half a year to many years to do this.
• As I look around I have no idea where to start.
• It will cost us a lot of money in the next few years to change but this current flux and change is temporary. why not simply make the few changes to get by until things get back to normal.

So let me say a few things you have probably heard many times before but not specifically about composable:

•  You have probably heard people say, "Don't boil the ocean" and then say look at ROI for small steps and then make changes as you go. Before you know it you will have lots of ROI to prove your changes and then the costs will be worth it as you start to see the benefits.
• Start with something simple. Look at some of your processes and see if there are any standard processes map to your processes as close as possible. Now they may only match say 50% or 60% or more if you are lucky but as you look at the parts that don't match look at the reasons why. Is there justification for those differences or are they different solely to make your business different? If changing them does not reduce your ROI then maybe making that change will help you later as you decide to change to another system or integrate with newer and better solutions.
• "These changes are NOT temporary" During this pandemic as we moved into the first lockdown people said it was temporary and decided to get by while locked down but when the second lockdown occurred less people said that but still a lot of people claimed it was temporary. Now that we are in lockdown 4, you cannot simply say this is temporary it is now a cyclical pattern. Even with a vaccine against this iteration there are already more on the way. Now think even before the pandemic as everyone said e-commerce was a fad but when 2019 came around and malls were becoming empty and businesses without an e-commerce solution were closing chains.  

It is important that you start now on your journey and it is not difficult to start. Whether you are a manager or executive or  really an employee at any level, you can start Monday morning by making note of what things take up your time each day. What interactions or meetings do you have? What information do you share with others? Is there a standard way you can do it so you can use tools to simplify the process and save you time?  The key is to try not to develop them but find ones others are using. As you standardize these interactions you become more composable.

If you have questions or need help on getting started feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or email me at chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com

 

Composable Is About Your Entire Business Not Just Your Application Stack

 Welcome to Composable Mentoring Guild. You will hear a lot about Composable DXP and making your application stack composable but given the era we live in we need our entire businesses to be composable. As we head in and out of Covid lockdown we need to be able to:

1. Have our employees be able to work everywhere.

2. Be able to adjust the services we sell based on need or limitations.

3. Sell to customers where they are.

4. Be able to adjust the services we use based on need.

This is just a few examples on how to be composable. For Covid lockdown most businesses saw it as a short term temporary change and made accommodations temporarily.  However as we head into the second lockdown and will continue in the coming years to repeat that cycle we need to treat it as permanent. We need to adjust constantly and the way to do that is by adopting a composable model for our businesses.  As time goes on we will post more info on this. If you need help moving to composable then reach out we are happy to assist. 

Chris Williams
Email: chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswilliams/