[Composable DXP] Event-driven data and service orchestration

Initiated by Kestros and Kleiber Digital - The DXP Experts Continued by the LinkedIn Group Composable DXPs Collective: Innovate and Collaborate A little Introduction The purpose of this article is to present a holistic definition of "Composable Platform" in the realm of current, and future Digital Experience platforms. It is freely accessible to anyone interested in exploring a new era of platform technology, for those eager to build new cutting-edge platform solutions, or for those who simply wishing to stay informed. If you want to participate in defining the True Composable Platform Manifesto, join the LinkedIn Group Composable DXPs Collective: Innovate and Collaborate and collaborate in the discussion. The decisions will be collected in this article. Note: We have been researching and exploring composable technologies since 2016 and have been developing a composable DXP that showcases and follows the key features of the manifesto. Why a new DXP Technology? Today's digital experience platforms (DXPs) face significant challenges, especially for mid-to-large organizations. Many of these platforms are built on outdated, monolithic structures that are costly, rigid, and difficult to adapt to the fast-changing needs of businesses. The purpose of the True Composable Platform technology is to overcome these obstacles and provide a new generation of DXP technology—one that is designed to be flexible, content-centric, and efficient. Below are some of the key challenges that make current DXP systems difficult for organizations to work with: Legacy, Monolithic Platforms: Many DXPs are built on platforms that are decades old, with a monolithic architecture that is expensive to maintain and extremely challenging to customize. Layer Dependency: Monolithic systems have tightly coupled layers, where each module is heavily dependent on the others. This makes changes complex and risky, slowing down any customization efforts. Data Buried in Solution Stacks: The data needed to deliver web experiences is often buried deep within the platform's layers. Instead of being content-centric, systems require extensive code just to extract and serve the data, making them inherently inefficient. Fragmented Experience Solutions: Building an integrated commerce experience requires multiple separate systems—DXP, eCommerce, ERP, CRM, etc.—each adding complexity, cost, and engineering overhead. Isolated Engineering Efforts: Every system requires its own engineering team, with separate codebases and DevOps strategies. This results in redundant and inefficient work across solutions. Vendors Reluctant to Modernize: Many vendors are focused on integrating existing systems rather than reimagining how these systems should work in today's dynamic landscape. High Maintenance Cost: Maintaining and updating these platforms is not only time-consuming but also requires significant engineering involvement for changes that bring minimal business value. Limited Budget for Innovation: Due to the significant challenges, many businesses are reluctant to invest in new solutions. A substantial portion of their budget is consumed by simply running and maintaining the current systems, leaving little room for innovation or transformation. Lack of Business Agility: Businesses need solutions that adapt rapidly to market needs, but current platforms make even small modifications, such as adding a product feature, costly and time-consuming. Traditional Design Paradigm: Monolithic systems are built on a "code-first, data-later" paradigm, whereas today’s business and marketing strategies require content-centric architectures to meet evolving consumer demands. Static Web Experience: Most current DXPs are built for creating static web experiences. However, today’s users expect highly interactive, seamless, and adaptive digital experiences, which are challenging to deliver without heavy, custom coding. This manifesto offers a vision of how future platforms can overcome these obstacles. By focusing on modularity, flexibility, and content-first design, a True Composable Platform is better equipped to meet the evolving and challenging needs of businesses and users alike. Objectives of a True Composable Platform The True Composable Platform aims to fundamentally re-engineer digital experience platforms (DXPs) to overcome the shortcomings of monolithic solutions. Unlike the MACH alliance's solutioning-based recommendations, we go beyond to establish a new architecture that supports true modularity and adaptability. Below are the essential objectives such a True Composable Platform shall comply to: Content-First Approach: Most business and marketing strategies are content-driven, which requires a content-first rather than a code-first or API-first approach. The platform must prioritize content creation, management, and distribution. Elimination of Functionality-Dependencies: Unlike monolithic systems, where functionality layers are tightly coupled, composable components must be independent, interchangeable, and reusable, eliminating such tedious dependencies between different functionalities. Composable Components to build Experiences: Web, user, and customer experiences are built from independent composable components that can be easily modified, created, or removed. For instance, components can represent hotel room details, reservation processes, or payment methods. Content Responsibilities on Component Level: Each component is responsible for its own content distribution and reception. This enables the same content to be used seamlessly across various contexts, e.g. a driverless car display or car manufacturing processes. Dynamic Content Creation: Content must be created dynamically, eliminating challenges with rigid data schemas, stored procedures, and deeply nested solution layers. This ensures efficient content retrieval and manipulation. Separation of Content, Functionality, and Design: The platform shall separate content from functionality and design, allowing composable components to be reused across different environments. This improves flexibility and adaptability to various use cases. Unified Deployment for On-Prem and Cloud: No differentiation between on-premises and cloud-native DXP instances should exist. Users should experience a full-featured DXP regardless of deployment location, ensuring consistency and scalability. Unified Experience Across Systems: There must be no distinction between different business systems such as Web, eCommerce, ERP, CRM, etc. Composable components should be utilized across all experience segments, making the DXP truly unified. Scalable DXP Instances: The platform must follow a model similar to AWS, enabling fully scalable instances, depending on traffic and volume. During peak times, additional instances are launched automatically, while during low activity periods, instances are scaled down to minimize infrastructure costs. Agile Experience Development: Building experiences must follow Agile methodologies, with composable components allowing for easier implementation of agile processes such as demos, QA testing, deployments, and the continuous release model now known as "Product Development." Component Lifecycle Management: The lifecycle management should apply to individual components rather than traditional project or solution lifecycles. While the overall web experience remains "unlimited," individual components can be updated, replaced, or retired as needed. MVP to Continuous Improvement: A composable DXP enables the creation of a small "minimal viable product" (MVP) that can be continuously expanded and improved by adding or enhancing individual components, supporting a dynamic and flexible growth model. Seamless Deployment: Deployment of composable components and releases should be seamless and ideally automated. The platform should support automatic deployments into running instances, reducing manual intervention and improving efficiency. The True Composable DXP Manifesto 1. Content-centric Approach DEFINITION: A true composable DXP must adopt a "content first, then code" principle. The platform should be capable of building content-centric solutions, where functionality is developed around content strategies, putting content at the heart of the digital experience. EXPLANATION: Business and marketing strategies are fundamentally content-driven. Problems, solutions, and even products themselves are defined by content—everything is content. A true composable DXP must embrace this by allowing functionality to be built around content strategies, rather than forcing content into rigid, predefined structures. Traditional systems often take a "code-first" approach, constructing applications first and then squeezing the content into what’s available. By reversing this paradigm—focusing on "content first, then code"—businesses can achieve more effective, flexible, and meaningful digital experiences. EXAMPLE: When, for example, describing a hotel room, a content-centric approach means first defining all relevant content elements, such as room dimensions, amenities, photos, and descriptions. This content strategy is established before any functionality is built. Once the content is fully defined, the functionality, such as displaying the rooms, making a reservation and processing a booking, is then developed around it. This ensures that the experience is driven by the content itself, leading to richer and more intuitive user interactions, as opposed to traditional systems that prioritize the application structure over the content needs. By focusing on content first, businesses can achieve faster implementations, lower implementation costs, quicker adaptation to marketing demands, and ultimately, a significantly more cost-effective solution. 2. Composable Experience Components DEFINITION: Composable Experience Components are the foundational building blocks used to create any digital experience. These experiences can range from dashboards, web pages, and commerce experiences to IoT applications like driverless cars. These components are interchangeable and, where possible, independent of each other, similar to "mosaic stones" that can be combined in various configurations to create unique and adaptable digital solutions. EXPLANATION: By assembling an experience with Composable Components, any experience can be built and extended with a significantly shorter time to market and at much lower cost. The architecture of these components allows them to be reused across different experiences, maximizing efficiency and reducing redundancy. This combination of reusability and faster implementation is a major advantage over traditional, tightly coupled software stack monoliths, where creating or extending functionality is often time-consuming and costly due to the inherent dependencies among such layers or modules. With Composable Components, businesses can quickly adapt and innovate by leveraging existing components to create new, customized experiences in a cost-effective manner. 3. Minimal Functional Dependencies DEFINITION: In a true composable DXP, components must have minimal or no dependencies on one another. This approach prioritizes the independence of each component, allowing functionality to stand alone without relying on tightly coupled layers. EXPLANATION: By eliminating functional dependencies, building a fully customizable web experience becomes significantly faster and more cost-effective. The independence of each component allows for constant extensions and improvements by adding or modifying composable components, making it easier to enhance the overall user experience. This flexibility also supports adding interactive elements or smooth processes, such as reservations, bookings, or payments, without disrupting existing functionality. Every component implementation or modification delivers high business value, unlike traditional monolithic systems where customization is a costly and time-consuming process due to the tightly coupled dependencies among layers and functionalities. EXAMPLE: In the hotel room scenario, adding "amenities" to the room description and creating a feature to "search for rooms with specific amenities" can be achieved by simply adding new composable components and updating the relevant pages. This modular approach allows for swift changes without impacting other parts of the system. In contrast, traditional monolithic systems require updating the data schemas and modifying all the layers involved in handling "amenities," making such changes cumbersome and resource-intensive. 4. Dynamic Content Creation DEFINITION: A true composable DXP must be capable of creating content elements dynamically. This means that content objects are generated, modified, and managed in real time, allowing for flexible and adaptive content delivery that meets evolving business needs. EXPLANATION: Creating content elements dynamically offers a significant time and cost-saving advantage over the traditional approach of preparing data fields within rigid data schemas. In traditional systems, adding or modifying content often requires extensive planning and manual updates to data structures, which can be labor-intensive and prone to delays. Dynamic content creation, on the other hand, allows for real-time generation and modification of content elements, making it much more efficient and adaptable. This is especially beneficial for modifications or enhancements, which can be implemented quickly and without the need for re-engineering underlying data structures, thereby reducing both development time and associated costs. EXAMPLE: In the hotel scenario, an author can add new amenities by simply creating a new composable component and defining the necessary content elements, such as descriptions, images, or features. This process is efficient and does not require altering any rigid data schemas. Another example is a driverless car that collects and processes data in real time; new content elements, such as updated traffic information or newly recognized road signs, can be dynamically created and added to enhance the vehicle's behavior. Similarly, in a discussion board context, new content elements, such as additional comment types or multimedia attachments, can be introduced at runtime, allowing the platform to evolve continuously to meet user needs. These examples demonstrate how dynamic content creation enables adaptability and responsiveness that traditional systems struggle to achieve. 5. Dependency-less Content Distribution DEFINITION: A true composable DXP, along with its composable components, must be capable of distributing content dynamically, without any dependencies on design or layout elements. This ensures that content can be delivered flexibly to any channel or device, independent of presentation constraints. EXPLANATION: Dependency-less content distribution allows content to be fed to any channel or device, also enabling seamless integration or synchronization across different systems. This can involve indexed content delivered by the DXP through searches or queries, or individual content managed directly by a composable component. This approach ensures that the DXP becomes a central source for marketing and business strategic content, capable of automatically and immediately feeding any channel, device, or integration after any modification or update, without requiring extensive engineering efforts. This flexibility reduces the time and costs traditionally associated with distributing content across multiple platforms, while ensuring that all channels are always up-to-date with the latest information. EXAMPLE: For example, updates made in the car manufacturing process, such as new specifications or features, can immediately be distributed to car dealership sales experiences, providing sales teams with the most up-to-date information. At the same time, these updates can also be sent directly to driverless car onboard computers, ensuring that vehicles are operating with the latest configurations. This kind of seamless, dependency-less content distribution allows for synchronized, real-time updates across multiple channels and devices, showcasing the power and efficiency of a true composable DXP. 6. Adaptive On-Demand Scalability DEFINITION: A true composable DXP must automatically scale DXP instances and content based on demand. As traffic and volume increase, additional instances are ramped up to handle the load. Conversely, as traffic decreases, unnecessary instances are shut down to optimize resources and minimize costs. EXPLANATION: Adaptive and on-demand scalability significantly reduces infrastructure costs by dynamically adjusting resources according to demand. Traditional large implementations often require allocating enough servers to handle peak traffic, even during periods of low activity, resulting in wasted resources and higher costs. With adaptive scalability, the true composable DXP scales up during peak times and scales down during quiet periods, ensuring that resources are used efficiently. This approach also provides the flexibility to run both very small and very large experiences using the same composable DXP installation, making it suitable for a wide range of use cases without the need for extensive infrastructure changes. EXAMPLE: For example, the UniteFans.com project (an interactive fan engagement web experience) benefits greatly from adaptive on-demand scalability. By leveraging a true composable DXP, sports federations and leagues can start small, engaging only a few fans initially, and gradually scale into a multi-million fan engagement solution as demand grows. This scalability allows them to generate early revenue streams due to the flexible cost structure, which adjusts dynamically to fit their needs—keeping costs low during early stages while having the capacity to scale up as fan engagement increases. This flexibility is crucial not only for fan engagement initiatives but for any kind of business operations, enabling organizations to adapt to growth and changing demands efficiently, regardless of industry. 7. Adaptive Seamless Experience Scalability DEFINITION: A true composable DXP must allow experiences to be grown, modified, scaled, or improved at any given time without impacting other parts of the experience or related experiences. This approach ensures that each part of an experience can evolve independently, allowing for continuous adaptation and enhancement without causing disruptions elsewhere in the system. EXPLANATION: By focusing on tailoring experiences through the implementation or adaptation of composable components, Adaptive Seamless Experience Scalability allows for constant improvements without the need for extensive engineering work. Unlike traditional projects, where changes often require engineering efforts on the entire project, composable components enable specific parts of the experience to be modified independently, reducing complexity and cost. This modular implementation process also aligns perfectly with Agile methodologies, allowing teams to iterate quickly, deploy frequently, and deliver ongoing enhancements without disrupting the overall experience. EXAMPLE: For example, the UniteFans.com project demonstrates Adaptive Seamless Experience Scalability by allowing federations or leagues to start with a small set of interactive features and then gradually expand their offering by adding new features through composable components. This modular approach means that new capabilities can be introduced without disrupting existing functionality, resulting in a smooth and continuous growth of the fan experience. Federations can adapt their platform precisely in line with evolving needs and fan expectations, ensuring that their solution develops organically and remains relevant, all without the need for large-scale engineering efforts. 8. Agility by Design DEFINITION: A true composable DXP must support a development process, bug-fixing process, and enhancement process that aligns as closely as possible with agile methodologies. This ensures that every stage of building and evolving experiences is flexible, iterative, and responsive to change. EXPLANATION: Agility by Design means that the entire development process of a true composable DXP must align with every step of the Agile methodology, ensuring a streamlined and adaptable workflow. From product owners describing features, to business analysts defining content strategies, to designers creating layouts in tools like FIGMA or MIRO, every role and step should fit seamlessly into an agile framework. Developers then build the required components, followed by QA teams conducting thorough testing, with the entire process supporting agile demos, rapid iterations, and continuous deployment. This approach ensures that all stakeholders can contribute in real time, while experiences are continuously improved and deployed, maximizing speed, flexibility, and responsiveness to change. EXAMPLE: For example, the UniteFans.com fan engagement solution embodies Agility by Design. In this project, the federation or league can have fans vote for new features, incorporating fan feedback directly into the development process. Product owners then describe the new feature, and business analysts define the usage and content strategy behind it. Developers build the feature while QA teams test it to ensure quality. Once approved, the feature is automatically deployed into the running server without any need for server shutdown. This agile approach ensures that the solution evolves in direct response to fan input, with each new feature seamlessly integrated into the live experience, ensuring minimal disruption and maximum engagement.