What is the composable enterprise? And how does it relate to business process as a service? (BPaaS)

The composable enterprise is emerging from several demands for agile enterprises. Covid-19 was just a catalyst!

But what many don’t look at is how the composable enterprise with its foundation consisting out of APIs, Micorservervices and Packaged Business Capabilities will enable the next-generation of enterprise applications. Called Business Process as a Service!

This post will bring it together and explains, why you should start building your business applications on a business capability-driven model to be prepared for business process as a service application revolution.

What is the composable enterprise?

Probably the best definition I found was from Akana:

The “Composable enterprise is an approach to design that embraces the API economy, delivering business outcomes through the assembly and combination of packaged business capabilities”.

But what does this really mean?

• Agility, quick time-to-value and resilience are the cornerstones for the composable enterprise
• mix and match outcomes to enable proper outcomes
• supports businesses that discover they need to change quickly

What is a packaged business capability?

...For this sake what is even a business capability, and why should I package it?

A business capability describes the capacity a organization needs to perform for their core function. It is the need of an enterprise for certain functionality to achieve its objectives.

This means if you an webshop one business capability of yours is offering a portfolio of products on the internet, the other could be to offer a simple check-out and ordering capability.

Now you decide to “wrap” your check-out process because it is the simplest, smartest and convienetn function ever created and other webshops would love to use it as well. This means you are offering a packaged business capability you can easily resell and other can easy implement and exchange with their current capability.

Where is the difference between a microservice?

A microservice is the smallest logical unit that creates out of some input a relevant output which can be used for more compley applications. In our example would your check-out capability consist out of multiple microservices that take care about payment processing, login and verification.

How does this all relate to Business Process as a Service?

Now I hope it becomes very simple! 😁

If you take several packaged business capabilities together, you can define an end-to-end process. Our example would be cobbeling together the product portfolio capability, check-out capability, with the order capability and maybe even an fulfilment capability. Tada you would have a full function webshop for your customer from “find to fullfilment”. You see the whole thing about the composable enterprise is about playing “Lego” and have modular capabilities you can easily exchange or adapt. As such you can improve your process constant in an agile fashion.

Bonus, through the optimization and business process management layer you are able to measure, track and improve the processes even further.

Summary:

• The composable enterprise is an architecture and development methodology that will greatly benefit the BPaaS revolution.
• Focusing modern enterprise applications on outcomes, and not only output will differentiate a future company.

Call-to-Action:

• Join our vibrant LinkedIn Community to get the latest news about BPaaS and engage with like-minded people!
• Register under the following form if you would be interested in the latest research around BPaaS. Including trends, vendors, and much more!