Composability and Packaged Business Capabilities

As Digital Transformation becomes more and more critical for modern business success, it has become obvious that organizations need more computer applications created than ever before. This high demand is outstripping the availability of professional programmers to meet that need. There are two fundamental ways to accommodate an increase in programming output.

The current emerging trend to “create” more programmers centers around the low-code and no-code programming paradigms that allow non-professional programmers, such as power users and subject matter experts, outside the IT department (Citizen Developers) to build robust applications.

Improving enterprise-wide programming techniques and capability is a main focus of the Business Composability trend. We will explore in more details the concepts of Business Composability and Packaged Business Capabilities in the sections below. Industries where change is the most urgent, such as healthcare, retail, and finance should be the industries most invested in composable thinking applied to their applications, solutions, and initiatives.

What is Business Composability?

In the Gartner® for IT Leaders report titled Becoming Composable: A Gartner Trend Insight, the research firm defines Business Composability as applying “the core principles of composability (modularity, autonomy, orchestration and discovery) to the foundations of an organization’s business architecture (the business model, enterprise operations and strategy) in order to master the risk of change and reach untapped business value” and also enumerates the three pillars that comprise Business Composability: Composable Thinking, Composable Business Architecture and Composable Technologies.

Composable Thinking

requires leaders to consider all facets of their business as modular and changeable at any time as driven by market, economic, geopolitical, regulatory, and other forces. As some say, the only constant is change, and composable thinking prepares enterprises for opportunities to disrupt.

Composable Business Architecture

describes an adaptive reuse architecture that applies the principles of composability to business architecture with a “building block” approach for business entities like org units, products, capabilities, services, etc. This also includes agreement on ways the blocks will fit together and interact while assuring each is independent of others and can safely be changed without effect to other blocks.

Composable Technologies

support businesses and their adaptable architecture goals via processes progressing from monolithic applications to a landscape of purchased/developed applications or application blocks called Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC).

The increasing pace of business change and digital transformation initiatives require more business applications and to meet that need, non-IT developers using low-code paradigms (Citizen Developers) and IT professionals are joining together into multidisciplinary digital business teams that Gartner describes as “fusion teams”. Fusion teams typically lack in-depth technical skills and so they must shift application modularity from complex technical SOA API application construction to building business capabilities with simple, business-oriented APIs. Reforming the developer force is a perfect time to apply composable ideas to create business capabilities that can be the basis for a whole new reusable component strategy.

As most CXOs are learning, much of the enterprise software they need today is deployed simply to remain competitive. Large-scale enterprise software from big vendors for systems such as CRMs, ERPs, Accounting, Procurement, Human Resources, etc. fulfill basic business requirements but take little or no advantage of an organization’s value adds and innovations in their marketplaces. That still leaves an increasing void in the software development phase of each organization’s digital transformation efforts. This is where Composable Applications, one of Gartner’s top strategic technology trends, comes into play. Gartner defines Composable Applications as made up of reusable Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) that fusion teams can self-assemble to rapidly create business applications.

What are Packaged Business Capabilities?

A Packaged Business Capability (PBC) is a collection of software components representing a business service or function that stands alone, is functionally recognizable as such by a business user, can be consumed as a whole, and does not depend on external data or services to carry out its task(s). These bundled business functions then serve as building blocks for larger applications with a single simple external API. Technically, a PBC is a bounded collection of a data schema and a set of services, APIs, and event channels. Every PBC includes persistence, business logic, and standard interfaces (API and events).

Most organizations have difficulties keeping up with market and regulatory changes because of the structure of their current application portfolio. These application portfolios’ security, compliance, data storage, and external and internal communication protocols are all bound together and maintaining them has become a large part of every IT organization’s day-to-day work. Modern organizations need PBCs that can be assembled, reassembled, and extended. Packaged Business Services and Business Composability address precisely the inter-relationships of those components. For example, the standardization of communication interfaces (APIs) makes it possible to maintain backwards compatibility for every PBC and DevOps features like platform and application automatic updates, significantly reduce the effort and cost of maintaining rapidly changing services.

PBCs can do a lot for an organization including cutting costs and reducing the sheer number of internal and external interfaces with which employees and customers must interact. Since there are fewer interfaces to learn and navigate, PBCs are just easier to work with. Plus, there is only one interface to work with and that frees up time to further automate business processes and unify data for even more streamlined operations.

Are Microservices the Same as Packaged Business Capabilities?

Yes and no. The difference in principle between the two is that microservices are an architectural style while PBCs are defined as business building blocks for business applications. From this perspective, they are complimentary, and PBCs are typically aggregations of microservices.

Microservices architecture is embraced by professional developer teams who create independent components with lightweight APIs that make building solutions faster and easier but that means little to business leaders and users. As citizen developers and fusion teams emerge, PBCs are a far more meaningful concept to grasp. With the burgeoning of the low-code paradigm, especially in model driven platforms, fusion teams can easily build and deploy composable apps from their catalog of standardized PBCs.

A classic example of a PBC is the virtual shopping cart on an e- commerce website. The shopping cart uses the catalog, pricing, and checkout functions (likely microservices within the PBC) to complete a purchase, while the customer only sees the user interface (UI) of the cart. A PBC can also be used to manage the customer and their account. Here, the PBC would make use of a collection of microservices to obtain and maintain contact information, configure customer roles, and handle customer service requests.

Based on Gartner, healthcare organizations are “early in their journey to becoming composable enterprises.” Perhaps Gartner was being extra kind, as U.S. Healthcare Payers came in dead last in the business composability rankings of organizations meeting the “high composability” standard. High-composability enterprises utilize the principles of composable thinking, business architecture and technology “widely” or “extensively throughout the enterprise.”

According to Gartner, there is evidence of an early majority of healthcare providers looking to embrace new technologies and practices, but funding is currently limited. According to the survey, Healthcare Providers score low on composable thinking practices, especially around culture and the results indicate that CIOs are more comfortable with a conservative approach or are not familiar with composable thinking practices.

It will be the highly composable Healthcare Delivery Organizations and Healthcare Payers with the ability to adapt and rapidly respond to the market’s demands that will see the most success as healthcare fights it way back from the pandemic.

Trisotech
Composability and Packaged Business Capabilities in Healthcare

Trisotech is a founding member of BPM + Health which includes BPMN™, as well as DMN™ and CMMN™, as integral standard technologies. Trisotech healthcare clientele include international and U.S. acute care hospitals, healthcare insurance organizations, HMOs, renowned teaching hospitals, PPOs, and healthcare professional organizations.

Trisotech provides nearly 1,000 free pre-built evidence-based workflow and decision models including care pathways, clinical guidelines, and healthcare calculators in the BPM+ Health standard that can be immediately used as Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs). These models are human-readable, machine automatable, embeddable in most medical encounter systems, and can be invoked as component services in other low-code applications. Healthcare organizations can use these models, created under the direction of Trisotech CMIO John Svirbely, MD, as they are, or quickly and easily modify them to fit the exact nature of their organization’s policies and procedures. Healthcare organizations can also create their own PBCs and services from scratch with the easily understood Workflow visual modeler (BPMN) that can be shared by IT, practitioners, SMEs, and business people – citizen developers and fusion teams.