Digital Experience Composition: It is ON
When you compose a digital experience, it’s imperative that it doesn’t grow unmanageable. You need control. That’s what DXC does for you. It’s basically a conductor using its baton to master the data.
DXC: What it is – and why you need it
During the summer of ’22 Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce 2022 came out – and handed us the term Digital Experience Composition. DXC covers a category that’s rapidly evolving and challenges more traditional schools of thought within tech architecture. That especially includes monolithic builds, but also newer technologies such as DXP, which – in our opinion – is disadvantaged by its structural necessity that all data pass through their control sphere.
Basically, Digital Experience Composition is a way to orchestrate headless, decoupled, and composable tech stacks to create multiple digital experiences. DXCs are low- or no-code environments. They merge and systemise backend data from headless services such as CMS, PIM, ERP, DAM, or commerce – and provide front-end developers, marketeers, or other digital teams with easy API connectivity to any front-end framework.
DXC enables organisations to obtain a tailored infrastructure composed of different systems and sources matching their exact needs – without losing themselves in complexity and custom code. This is a major learning from the past 10-ish years. When looking back, the need to digitalise has left too many organisations with a spiderweb of systems and custom fixes that are cumbersome to maintain and end up being a barrier for further digital development. Luckily, we’ve learned from the past and many now recognises the need to stay in control by orchestrating the backend data and prioritise performance across sources.
DXC in the future – from innovation to plateau
With the Hype Cycle report, Gardner has put DXC in the spotlight as a major technology in the future of infrastructure. As the illustration shows, DXC is still in the early innovation stages and expected to reach plateau in just 2-5 years.
Enterspeed is riding the DXC wave. Digital Experience Composition perfectly describes our point of view and our endeavour to restructure composable development away from custom builds to off-the-shelf. Because composable development is EVERYWHERE – and rightfully so. It is, however, imperative to plan long-term and shield yourself from lock-in and other hidden costs of headless.
Check out more on Headless Headaches: Is the Headless Honeymoon over?
Orchestrating composed data
Take control of your composition – and stay there.
When opting for a composed architecture, you opt for the freedom to choose your best technical fit. But as with anything else in this world, the freedom to choose, also means you need to choose right. If you, in your zeal to build a thoroughly comprehensive solution, end up with a whole bunch of systems, you’ll need to set yourself up for control. Otherwise, you might end up losing track of your digital composition.
So, what can you do to stay in control? Well, you can either employ a highly skilled conductor who knows how to play the orchestra – or you can accumulate everything in one environment that can manage all your different sounds, instruments, and timings.
That’s why we invented the Speed Layer. In our experience, companies and consultancies tend to make one of two common mistakes: They either pipe all data through the CMS, thus creating a de facto monolith that isn’t really made for that (resulting in a bunch of custom patches). Or they build a highly custom conductor on top of their systems, thus making themselves highly dependable on the developers and/or agencies that build it. Furthermore, custom builds need a lot of maintenance. Thus, you risk undermining the whole point of doing composed digital experiences rather than traditional build in the first place.
Check out more on build vs. buy: Build at your own risk.
Stuck on legacy?
Don’t sweat your imperfect world.
If your planned digital composition is not all brand new, there’s really no need to panic and dissolve everything and start from scratch. Because really, who doesn’t drag along a little legacy?
Whether you go for a digital conductor or a DXC environment, consider the upside of choosing one that embraces any legacy, that you might want to keep. It’s a shame to set up a whole new digital experience that can’t utilize your digital heritage.
DXC might be a brand-new term for a somewhat new technology, but it’s not just relevant for new companies. Actually, a very likely scenario is, that especially enterprises and other major organisations will jump on DXC, since the category is essentially developed to orchestrate complex infrastructures with several data sources. And that type of organisation is typically legacy heavy.
So, even if the starting point of your infrastructural turn-around is far from perfect and neat, digital experience composition might be your ideal route towards faster and simpler digital transformation.
Check out more on The inconvenient truth of the IT imperfection of the world.
Going MACH? First choose the right conductor
Innovate fast – develop swiftly. One of the biggest buzzes of 2022 is MACH technology (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless). And while almost every SaaS company, agency and techy organisation is looking to be MACH certified, not nearly all have the infrastructure it takes.
Enterspeed enables MACH by simplifying your stack of headless backend systems and microservices – and serving the data at high speed to the frontend.
Enterspeed’s Speed Layer is basically a digital conductor, that can integrate any data source and systemise the incoming data to make it extremely easy to maintain and change, thus giving you the benefits of both speed of innovation and speed of development.
If you haven't guessed it, we're completely excited about DXC. Especially our CEO Toke Lund. And he would love to talk about how you can utilise the space.
Book him for a talk right here.
Want to know more about Enterspeed as DXC?
We'll keep the baton ready.
Are you still left with a few questions about DXC and how it can enable your business? Just reach out. We'll be happy to talk about possibilities, and how a Speed Layer can take your architecture to the next level. And it's of course completely non-committal 😇