Welcome to the digital-fast era — around you you’ll see hand-held ecommerce shopping, mind-bending virtual reality experiences and personalised content that evolves with your wants and needs. Who’s shaping these trends? Your customers. On-demand experiential customer interactions are forcing brands to be immediately responsive and consistently adaptive. To keep pace, digital teams have turned away from monolithic solutions favouring the microservices of a composable architecture. The flexible, modular capabilities of composable architecture give teams the ability to build digital experiences that are better, faster and infinitely scalable. The question now is, how do digital teams show the value of these strategies and technologies in a way that can be documented and easily digested?

What are the 5 key pillars to measure your Tech Stack?

When researching and shopping for new technology, the aspects you consider to be important — like whether the technology is agile, customisable and able to grow with your company in any and all directions — are the same parameters you should measure when qualifying how effectively your technology delivers on those expectations. These five value pillars can be used as a general framework to assess your architecture’s performance.

SPEED 

Seize the opportunity 

Customers want it all and they want it now — which is why speed is the first value to consider with your technology. Your tech should enable digital teams to start and complete projects as quickly as possible. We’re talking speedy implementation, speedy launches and speedy deliveries — you should measure it all. 

Speed value categories 

Time to value 

Instead of building everything by hand, you have the option to build right out of the box. Developers are equipped with tools including ready-to use APIs, extensive documentation and educational resources that offer opportunities to create customised capabilities from scratch or build them on top of existing templates. 

Time to market 

You have the power to launch new services, products or experiences at the pace of customer demands. To stay one step ahead of competition, the architecture you adopt should facilitate quick creation, deployment and iteration of your newest brainchild. Slow time to market runs the risk of pushing project delivery so far into the future that they might no longer be relevant, wasting time and money. 

Speed of operations 

This refers to task automation. Doing things manually on a case-by-case basis is no longer efficient — it’s monotonous and taxing. Automation saves you and your team time and energy which can be allocated towards more strategic efforts and experimentation.

FLEXIBILITY

Customise to your current and future needs 

As fortune-telling is an uncommon, and unreliable, talent, it’s difficult to tell what the future holds and harder to plan for it. For this reason, it’s important that the architecture you adopt is customisable to your business and favourite technologies as they stand today, tomorrow and in two years. A flexible architecture means that your offerings, experiences and services are not limited by rigid, ageing tech but can evolve with changing business directions and digital trends. Evolving with the times and trends makes your brand discoverable so customers don’t have to go searching for it — at least not very far. 

Flexibility value categories 

Technology debt 

Are your microservices stacked to enhance functionality across your composable architecture? You should be excited by the idea of adding and experimenting with new technology instead of feeling locked into ageing processes due to previous tech or architectural choices. 

Developer satisfaction 

Teams can code in their programming language of choice and follow the data model that fits their current preferences. The ability to build in a tool-and language-agnostic environment increases developer satisfaction and the potential of their output — both important in retaining the strongest members of your tech team. 

Employee experience 

Your team is productive and spends most of their time doing what they are trained to. And, because creating great customer experiences is a team sport, they’re able to collaborate within a single platform. Inflexible, opinionated technology limits experimentation and the envelope-pushing projects that digital teams love. Back to tech debt, flexibility ensures your people spend less time on workarounds and more time on strategic initiatives.

EXTENSIBILITY 

Extensibility value categories 

Operational efficiency 

Teams can automate content and data migrations. In optimising operations, teams utilise features like workflows, user roles and tasks, which offer clarity in project coordination and collaboration. Scaling also means it’s easy to add new users and alter roles as your organisation grows. 

Integration 

You can meet new and expanded needs easily with integrations from a production-ready app framework, ready-to-use SDK library or marketplace. With these functionalities there is a minimal learning curve. Your in-house team can build the perfect set up quickly — no need to outsource a pricey platform-specific specialist to do the work. 

User customisations 

Extensible technology offers interface customization options to help brands work in the format they prefer with the data and content they reference and use. Extensive user interface customisations boost team member satisfaction and aid with productivity.

SCALABILITY

Scalability value categories 

Market reach 

This is company dependent but focuses on your brand visibility within an industry and around the globe. Attracting customers worldwide requires localization features like translation services, the option to segment content and reliable delivery methodologies. As you reach more markets, organic visits will improve SEO rankings. With better rankings, you can begin to lower paid search and advertising spend. 

Personalisation 

With personalisation, you offer customised experiences based on a customer’s interests, behaviours or location. Reusable content paired with easy-to-use editorial features makes addressing personas straightforward. According to a McKinsey study, personalization has been linked to 5–15% increases in revenue. 

Reusability 

This is the key to scalability. It’s found in the ability to create content once and use it everywhere. This is often achieved through structured content, which deconstructs content into blocks that can be restructured to create new experiences and fit new channels. This is also found in repeatable processes through seamlessly integrated microservices. 

RELIABILITY

Reliability value categories 

Security 

Reliability can translate to unlimited storage and regular data backups with limited developer dependence. The first two items mean brands can launch and roll back projects knowing that should something break, a previous version is available. The most reliable technology today is cloud-based. With everything housed online, teams can share and collaborate on internal assets without excessive downloading or sending. 

Dependable delivery 

This speaks to the time it takes for a page to load for individual users. Reliability means that latency is limited or eliminated — downtime occurs infrequently, if ever. Content delivery networks, which store cached versions of your site at servers located near users, help achieve this. If traffic overwhelms one server resulting in error, another in the network will fill the gap. 

Digital experience performance 

Fast page load times, a product of dependable delivery, lead to improved digital experiences for customers. When customers can get the experiences and information they want quickly and predictably, it increases the authenticity and value of brand engagements.