83 platforms. Besides the expense, effort and time, this drains your team’s morale as you lose any sense of permanence. All urgency to make full use of the current tools is also removed because users know that the technology won’t be around for long. When evaluating an enterprise solution, how far are you away from the back wall? And does that wall move? In any healthy organisation, your needs will grow over time, so is the solution going to grow with you? This is the eternal struggle – how do we avoid overwhelming our organisations while not backing ourselves into a corner? This hottest buzzword in enterprise software these days is ‘composable’. The promise is that businesses can ‘compose’ a solution by bolting together pieces that are usually provided by the same vendor. This is a change from tradition, which previously saw organisations creating a best-of-breed solution from several vendors. Start small and build outwards. Engage with your vendor at a level that will neither overwhelm your budget nor your users, but one that gives you room to grow and experiment. Your users are part of your organisation’s story, and they want to be both engaged by their present capabilities and know that there’s a larger plot to carry them forward. Microsoft Azure is a great example. There’s a stunning depth of tools and services on the cloud platform. I don’t know what most of them do, but that’s okay, because they’re outside my sphere of need. I’m not paying for them, and I haven’t engaged with them yet. I have what I need right now, but the functional horizon is so far away that I will never reach it. And this is the promise of composability: it will neither overwhelm nor constrict. The walls move – you can stay cosy yet expand over time. Your users will thank you for it. Deane Barker is senior director of content management strategy at Optimizely “How do we avoid overwhelming our organisations while not backing ourselves into a corner?”
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