Creating A Composable Business Process: Consumption

One of the main benefits of building applications with a composable business philosophy is that innovation happens more quickly. And that’s because composable development increases the speed with which enterprises can make iterative updates to their user experiences.

- giovedì 23 dicembre 2021
Tags: Technical

An enterprise application is never “done,” and that’s never more apparent than to those who are actually using it. While the engineering team may spend weeks or months spinning up a project, it can often take business users only minutes to identify its areas of needed improvement. Being able to prioritize those needs and execute on them quickly is what makes for an innovative organization. 

In this blog series, we have been discussing Entando’s fourfold vision for application composition. The four phases of application composition are: creation, curation, composition, and consumption. In this final part of the series, we will focus on the consumption aspect of composable business and how it feeds back into the creation phase of the process.

The consumption team is responsible for creating and managing users and roles, adding and updating content within the template provided to them, editing rules and managing processes, analyzing performance, and helping to define how the application needs to evolve based on user needs. 

Providing a Feedback Loop From Business to IT

4_Personas.svg

While mostly composed of non-technical people, the consumption team of the composable business organization is often one of the key catalysts for innovation. While developers may have an idea about how their application will be used and enjoyed during the creation, curation, and composition stage of the process, it is during consumption that the application is truly battle tested. 

Providing a feedback loop is important to identifying and prioritizing necessary patches, updates, and upgrades, as well as determining what stage of the process will need to be reexamined in order to make that update a reality. Perhaps the components need to be composed in a different way, certain components need to be modified, or the application requires new components altogether. 

Key to success is ensuring that your feedback loop runs effectively. Entando is working to build robust tools that will help make that process within the platform even easier and more efficient for you. 

Bridging the Gap Between Technical and Non-Technical Stakeholders

The composable business process, rather than seeking to eliminate the business user’s need for or interaction with IT, seeks to bridge the gap between business and IT by increasing communication and supporting the business with visual interfaces and easy low code-like tools to test new concepts. However, rather than being purely low code, the process is pro-code – leveraging the best of customization and ease of use, and streamlining the flow of information from one discipline to another.

4_Leaf_Methodology.svg

This type of organizational structure, backed by composable business technology, allows enterprises to connect business and design users to the DevOps process, empowering faster adaptation to market change through fast updates that can be quickly evaluated for their effectiveness.

Fusion Teams

In order to achieve this effect, your enterprise may consider forming fusion teams. Gartner defines a fusion team as a “multidisciplinary team that blends technology or analytics and business domain expertise and shares accountability for business and technology outcomes. Instead of organizing work by functions or technologies, fusion teams are typically organized by the cross-cutting business capabilities, business outcomes or customer outcomes they support.”

The structure of these teams may be unique to the needs and structure of your organization but center around a specific business area and manage the scrum from end-to-end.

The autonomy of each fusion team should be augmented by strong governance standards, in order for these cross functional units to feel as though they are not being hampered or micromanaged, while also providing them with a broader context for what the application requires as a whole. 

There is a strong human element to fusion teams that allows your organization to see problems more clearly across skillsets, provide focused goals, leverage the strengths of different disciplines more effectively, and make your applications better tailored to your user and your organization’s needs. 

Build modular applications on Kubernetes with Entando ACP.

If you run containerized deployments, you understand the benefits of Kubernetes. You also understand how complicated it can be and how difficult it can be to gain developer adoption. It feels like there should be an easier way. 

That’s why we created an application composition platform that makes it easy to build enterprise applications on Kubernetes using modular components.

Entando ACP is changing the way enterprises think about building their apps, sites, and portals in order to promote developer productivity in a Kubernetes environment. 

With Entando ACP, you can:

  • Bootstrap an application from a customized template.
  • Accelerate app development to update iteratively.
  • Simplify deployments by abstracting the complexity of Kubernetes.

We integrate trusted open source technologies and extend their functionality to give you a cohesive and streamlined developer experience with easy-to-use patterns. From deploying on Kubernetes to creating modular backend and frontend architectures using your current technologies, Entando helps you at every layer of the stack. 

Entando is open source with available enterprise support and services. Begin developing on the platform today, and get a quote to see how our team can help your enterprise build better apps, sites, and portals––faster.

WHITE PAPER

CIO Alert - There is an Application Composition Platform in your Future

Di Massimo Pezzini, Independent IT Advisor

SCARICA IL WHITEPAPER

White-Paper-Pattern_mockup 3.png