Composable DXP and Digital Asset Management?

Introduction to composable DXP and how it relates to consistent digital experiences with a DAM at the center.

Great digital experiences require personalized, consistent and compelling content across many touchpoints which will capture the interest of our customers. Our customers rightfully expect the same experience in-store as they do online or when they follow our Instagram page. It only emphasize having the right building blocks to deliver it.

The above building blocks represent many best-of-breed platforms with specific purposes such as Personalization, Content (Digital Assets and more), Social Media, Marketing Automation, E-commerce and CMS. All tailored to do best within each of their domains but communicate seamlessly to reach a common goal. Providing great experiences.

As the number of new channels and need for omnichannel experiences grow, more platforms arise with the sole purpose of integrating or centralizing experience data to enable companies in providing new digital experiences in no time. They all need proper and streamlined content to deliver it which requires great integration capabilities of each platform.

How does this all relate to the term Composable DXP?

What is composable DXP? And why?

According to Gartner, all-in-one platforms are soon to be surpassed by Composable DXPs which are modular platforms consisting of many best-of-breed components (e.g. components equals Packaged Business Capabilities or PBCs). These components all communicate seamlessly through APIs and other integration capabilities.

From Monolothic DXP to Composable DXP

“Application leaders can not meet market needs or business objectives with monolithic digital experience platforms and must update tech stacks, decompose monoliths and deliver task-oriented capabilities. To future-proof the stack, a composable DXP must be used to deliver composable user experiences” says Gartner

Many benefits arise from this which will be the topic of the following section.

Benefits of Composable DXP

Creating the perfect stack for your business

• Benefitting from multiple vendors all being the best of best.
• Avoiding lock-in by single vendor or legacy technology (upgrade or replace independently).
• Quickly adapt and add new technologies or switch out with a new vendor.
• Encourage reusability across all composite parts to support growth and ROI of the technologies being introduced to your Composable DXP.
• Scalability where each cloud solution does what they do best.

Integrated stack with Omnichannel reach

• Reach you customers where they are with the platform tailored for it.
• Integrated stack which can deliver content throughout the omnichannel.
• Enabling the business users to create and maintain experiences without technical involvement with new tailored platforms.

Process for content creation, approval and distribution

• All content is created/managed within a few platforms (could be DAM for assets and PIM for product information) so the creation and approval process is centralized and accelerated.
• Content is accessed from the central repository and always easy to find and use.
• Platforms or people get approved content from the same place so replacing or hooking up new platforms are easy. And then those platform focus on experience with what has been approved.

Many industry leaders such as Sitecore, Optimizely and Contentful are all echoing this message. At the Sitecore Symposium, this was presented as a main driver for their platform strategy.

Gartner even predicts that “By 2023, organizations that have adopted an intelligent composable approach will outpace competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation”.

Advantages by introducing more platforms and flexibility often come with a set of challenges to be aware of. This is no exception and it will be the topic of next section.

Challenges of Composable DXP

The perfect stack has more complexity

• Multiple vendors means dealing with more stakeholders and more opinions. Must be managed will and is a challenge for smaller organizations.
• Each platform within the stack must be able to interoperate seamlessly. Integration capabilities and strategy of each platform must align well with the Composable DXP way of thinking.
• Security and trust between all the different platform must be considered. All must communicate and know certain elements about each other but must not compromise any content that it should not.
• Resilience when one platform fails which others depend on for certain elements. This should not bring down the whole platform.

The benefits by far outweigh the challenges but they must not be overlooked.

Concluding Remarks

Having a composable DXP allows your company to create the perfect Marketing Stack for your business from modular and scalable building blocks. And easily adapt to and evolve with the business and technology opportunities within your market.

Relating it to Digital Asset Management, then DAM is obviously one of the best-of-breed components in the composable stack. Many platforms rely on content to create the consistent and best possible digital experiences (in this case, it is the Images, Videos, 3D files, PDFs and more).

Centralizing the content creation and distribution process ensures quality assets which are all on-brand and have been approved centrally in the DAM before being made accessible. At the same time, the DAM must focus on its integration toolbox (as the other components of your composable DXP must do) to easily enable adoption and accessibility of digital assets throughout all platforms. These platforms can then focus on creating the digital experience with the right assets at hand.

I’m really interested in this domain so if you have any input or comments then feel free to reach out.

Thanks for reading.

Sources

“Gartner, Adopt a Composable DXP Strategy to Future-Proof Your Tech Stack”; Irina Guseva, Yefim Natis, Mick MacComascaigh, Mike Lowndes, Gene Phifer; 16 December 2020