Published on the 11/08/2022 | Written by Heather Wright

Driving personalised digital experience with DXC…

In a world where your brand success depends on the experience you can deliver to the customer, enriching the customer experience and providing a connected experience which meets the specific needs of the customer is the ultimate goal.

“Composability itself does not equal agility when examining the time to value of the initial implementation effort.”

Welcome to the emerging market of digital experience composition. While digital experience platforms (DXPs) reflect demand to platforms to manage digital experiences of customers, partners and employees and provide contextualised digital experiences, digital experience composition (DXC) is focused on digital multi-experience orchestration in an API-first ‘headless’, decoupled composable world.

Gartner defines digital experience composition (DXC) as ‘the packaging of low-code developer and no-code business user tooling for the creation, development and maintenance of digital experience’.

The analyst firm says there are three main enabling technologies: Front end as a service, a page builder and templating engine and an API integration layer to the underlying technologies. 

It’s an opportunity to decouple the front end from underlying technology so that the language of the underlying systems such as Java or .Net, no longer constrains the choice of technology for the front end. 

“The decoupled front end can be optimised for the requirements of the organisation, for example speed, mobile device rendering, offline use and search engine optimisation,” a new Gartner report, Innovation Insight for Digital Experience Composition, notes.

“The primary benefit of a composable approach to digital experience is to provide speed and agility to adapt the digital experience as internal and external requirements change. 

“Using lighter, composable technologies in a modular and decoupled manner allows the front and back ends to be optimised independently. Additionally, using digital experience composition tools makes ‘going headless’ less disruptive to both business users and developers, while also enabling adoption of modern standards for web-based performance and client-side sophistication.”

Digital experience composition enables component assembly to be displayed from multiple underlying systems, Gartner says. 

Once developers have connected the relevant systems, and created front-end components, business users are able to create digital experiences to better serve their audience’s needs from the capabilities that have been connected. 

Front-end developers can optimise the delivery technology according to their requirements and can work in collaboration with business users for incremental innovation.

Gartner says increasingly, its clients are developing custom front ends for logged-in – portal-like – experiences, allowing them to bridge multiple internal systems in a unified manner for audiences. 

And the most common combinations Gartner clients are seeking advice on? Well, they include composing their own DXP, CMS plus digital asset management, CMS plus commerce, commerce and customer service, headless CMS and layout and headless CMS plus personalisation. 

Done correctly, composable DXP systems should create the foundation to manage all content and campaigns in a central hub, bringing an organisation’s entire marketing stack together, including e-Commerce and analytics and enabling organisations to connect all digital aspects of the business together to create a customer journey.

Composability might be hot topic at the moment, but it’s not leading the way on the ground just yet, particularly with digital experience platforms, where monolithic, single platform software, rather than SaaS still hold sway.

That’s no doubt indicative of both confusion as to what true composability means – with some vendors touting composability when simply selling separate modules – and the fact composable is a journey and one which starts with composable business and composable thinking, before moving to areas such as composable DXP.

Gartner acknowledges that DXC adoption is currently low, but increasing ‘rapidly’ among digitally mature businesses as the shift to ‘headless’ gains momentum.

“Brand and commerce experiences, especially, rely on browser performance and search engine rankings which benefit greatly from the DXC approach. 

“Packaged solutions that enable no-code management of decoupled front ends will accelerate this shift from its current adoption by the digitally mature, toward the mainstream.”

But if DXC offers the way of the future for many, there are also plenty of cons to consider alongside those pros. 

Gartner highlights the complexity of set up, with more contracts to manage, the difficulty in finding the required front-end skills and the high digital maturity required. Solution selection choice paralysis can also be a challenge.

There’s also the risk of the pendulum swinging back from multi-vendor best-of-breed to the single vendor ‘suite play’ as vendors adopt the principles of composability. 

“Composability itself does not equal agility when examining the time to value of the initial implementation effort,” Gartner says. “Monoliths or suites can be easier to launch initially, however clients find that subsequent agility is low.”

The main benefit of DXC lies in future and ongoing flexibility as technologies can be updated or replaced without significantly affecting the entire stack.

In fact, the report goes so far as to say companies should avoid the composable approach if operational simplicity is a higher priority than architectural flexibility and agility, or if they lack the appropriate skills to implement custom UIs and integrations. 

“Packaged or suite solutions from web content management, commerce or digital experience platform vendors may better serve this use case.”

Nonetheless, Gartner is urging organisations with ‘traditional’ WCM, DXP or commerce platforms to start working with their vendors to understand the roadmap and future licensing implications and to be aware you may have a timeline required to be ready for composability. 

Ensuring you have the expertise and resources to implement and manage the additional complexity, and implementing composable digital experiences with full consideration for business users, are also advocated.