The strategic building blocks of the composable enterprise: Concepts & technologies

Right. So Annie, your talk is titled the strategic building blocks of the composable enterprise. And now the term composable enterprise was mentioned quite a few times during proceedings at EIC yesterday. So I'm curious to know what can we expect from your presentation today?

Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, thanks that I can be here and be speaking to you about this, but the, the composable enterprise, you may or may not be aware, but buzzwords are great at communicating an idea, but less so at the practical level. So what we did yesterday and what Martin brought in his keynote is the ideas, the emotion, the, the motivations behind this concept of composable.

And what I'll do is bring this a step deeper and hopefully talk about more of the practical side and how this is also very customizable, bringing it to the different needs of every individual organization. Amazing. That sounds exciting. We look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thank you. So now that introductions are out of the way we'll be diving straight in. Now I did mention that this is a building off of the opening keynote from yesterday delivered by Martin. If you haven't seen it should already be online, go check it out, but I'll give you a brief refresher.

If you didn't already listen to that, then we will be diving into something. We call the composable engine, perhaps a more practical look at what is inside a composable enterprise, what is actually making it run, and then consider how this can be fine tuned and tweaked a bit for every organization coming from where they are and getting to where they're going. So before we get to where we're going, let's take a look at where we came from, and this is all about buzzwords in a sense.

And they're, you know, fallible, you know, they're great at communicating this idea, but less so at the nuance that you need behind actually carrying this through and actually delivering this. So we won't go back to the Dawn of time, but we will go back to digital transformation, a very useful concept, but still has some weaknesses, you know, and this is the idea that a successful agile business is of course successful in agile because it utilizes digital technologies. That's of course, way overly simplified, but is often what people hold onto. When they think of digital transformation.

We could also pull that apart and say, well, it's not a transformation. It's not a single transformation, caterpillar to butterfly. It is a journey. This is a constant state of change. We could also consider a term like the API economy really useful and continues to be really important when we think about the composable enterprise.

But again, it's focusing so much on the technologies as being the key when that's really not the case. And so we see in both of these terms and countless others, that the focus is wrong. The focus is on the technology. We would all love technology to be the answer, but it's, we need to be looking at this from the other way around, from a business perspective. So let's try it again. Here's another term, the composable enterprise. And so this is our next attempt at this. So what do we mean with a composable enterprise?

Well, first of all, the basic assumption is that the world is not static and therefore the organization cannot be static, therefore, exercising, organizational and architectural modularity, interchangeability, and autonomy. And this all sounds wonderful, right? It's able to seize the moment by flexibly rearranging itself elements within itself to tackle the issues at hand.

Now, if we were having a theoretical conversation, this is where it would end. You would all clap and we'd all feel very good about ourselves, but how do we make this happen? And this is where my voice interjects into this definition, where I would say, we need some sort of connective tissue. How are we gonna enable all of these independent pieces to work together independently, to be able to function, but yet support each other? And I would say that connective tissue has to be trust and a quick means of verification in order to make this happen.

So I mentioned earlier, we have an idea called the composable engine. Love to know what you think about this when we're at the end. And this idea is that there's a trifecta of services, identity, and data in the organization. And the more that each feeds off of each other, that the more that each other consumes each other, the more each produces the other, and this creates motion. This creates momentum. So if we take services, for example, ideally these are self contained. They're API driven sounds fantastic.

These are consuming identity, it's consuming enterprise data, but yet it's also producing this as well. If we move over to identities, these are of course the gateway to services. It's also a service in itself. It's dependent on data more and more so on verified data, verifiable credentials. It's also producing data event logs information about accesses. Then we come down to data, which is really the enabler of these services of processes in the organization. This data has to be mobile. It has to be secured in order to be mobile.

So the concept of this engine is that the more each of these are independently secured are able to be more and more decentralized. The more it actually creates movement in the organization, movement of ideas, of processes, of programs, of services. And this function is how we can get to an agile decentralized organization. So this presentation, it's not to give you the recipe, but it's to give you ideas.

Now, every organization is coming at this slightly differently, has different goals in mind has a different underlying it architectural that it has to work with and bring along with it on this journey. And so what we've done is we've come up with a few building blocks, a few ways to tweak this engine, to help guide it in the direction that you need it to go. These are concepts and technology, and this is by no means an exhaustive list, but there's some important ideas.

And the first of these being decentralization, why we find this talk happening in our decentralized identity track, cuz this is a very important concept. So why is decentralization so important for composability it's there because it supports your modularity. You can take the decentralized architecture, both metaphorically and literally, you know, metaphorically in the sense that it can support this concept can support autonomous thinking, autonomous organization and structures, or it could also literally include a blockchain or other decentralized letter technology.

Now this can support modularity with a huge assumption that interoperability is there. We'll get to that later, but this has to be in place our immutable ledger. This is helping to bring that connective tissue that I mentioned earlier, this trust and a quick means of verification. Nobody's gonna be able to depend on information provided by another party with help being able to know that they can rely on it. The immutable ledger helps make that happen. This is a quick bridge over into verifiable credentials where this is much more focused on the identity side of things.

So again, this is to bring ideas to you helps stimulate a conversation. So how is this building block? How is decentralized identity in particular, in action in organizations? How are they using this to help propel their composable engine? We mentioned briefly verifiable credentials. This is a quick hop and a jump over to verified identity, reuse the idea that an individual has a digital identity and they could be using this in their role as a citizen or as a consumer or as an employee. Being able to bring this to multiple reliant parties or verifiers authentication.

This becomes quite interesting when you can bind your biometric authentication with a real world identity, adding more reliability here, this spreads over into genuine presence or KYC for financial institutions, but perhaps most interesting and applicable to really all transactions is the ability to selectively share attributes. So if we jump to the next building block here and we consider secure collaboration, this is all about the idea of data needing to be mobile. And the only way data can be mobile is that it is secure.

So here is very practical steps to getting there, have an underlying basis of discovery and classification know what the information is. You need to protect, prepare it for that protection in terms of rights management, being able to give that fine grained dynamic control. And of course, encryption align for data protection at rest in motion and use. And you can start to imagine how secure collaboration can then help the organization propel their data throughout through different services and create this, this composable agile feeling.

If everybody has access to the data, you can then have more options for collaboration, internal and external with the confidence that your IP is not going to be lost somewhere. This is also quite important. Then for analytics too, this can go into business intelligence or it can be supportive in your machine learning models as well for other projects, which leads us to the next concept here.

How does machine learning then contribute to the composable engine of being able to allow data to better serve your services, your identities, and bring your organization into new and different directions. Again, some practical considerations here that your computing resources really need to be flexible here to allow for the different stages here through your development training, implementation later retirement ML ops here, you need to be able to maintain your model throughout that life cycle, especially since we're considering the non-static world. There is constant change.

That means the environment that your model will be performing in, will change. The inputs will change. Perhaps your goals will change. So this needs to be in place to allow for that fine tuning. And that change that we are assuming will take place and is taking place explainability as well is very important on the security level, accountability, transparency. This is a really wide ranging piece here. So with machine learning, this is really a choose your own adventure, but the, the use cases and the applications tend to focus around decision making insights and recommendations.

So of course you can take this into the business intelligence direction. You can look at your augmented decision making flavor of your choice, classification, regression, natural language.

You can think about proactive responses, or if we go back to the image of our engine of connecting each of these trifecta data services and identity together, if we start embedding intelligence into our services, you're making that connection even closer, building that momentum between services and data, even more by align your employees or customers to access those recommendations at the point where they are working or needing to take action on something. So you can reduce the time there even more. And lastly, but perhaps the most important to make this all happen is interoperability.

And this is a huge theme at EIC this year. So please keep your eyes open for different sessions on this, because this is how we are going to get to the composable enterprise. We build a good foundation of interoperability. This can come from many different angles, practically your APIs practically your standards, but how do we get to those standards through global networks, through global frameworks who are really making practical steps to get there.

Now, this is perhaps challenging to explain why interoperability is so important, but here's just a, a brief, and probably by the time I'm presenting this from, from making it to presenting, it's probably already out of date, but you know, that's okay. You can let me know just a, a quick look at all the different standards that are interacting with each other and supporting each other to make one concept function. So if we take our verifiable credential standard from the w three C, maybe you've heard of it, hopefully. So it's relying on the did standard.

It's being supported by other emerging standards like did com did off governance could be provided then by the trust over IP stack. And there are bridges to the outside world. Then for example, the I dis bridge. So with that, I hope I've given you something to think about something to go back to your teams and discuss, how could we build this momentum, this exchange of data, identity, and services to allow, to enable the flexibility of decision making the flexibility to address the challenges that your org organization has.

Now, if we can, this needs to be focused on the organization itself, its own use cases. And so please keep in mind, this is a customizable recipe you build on your own use cases. You can use the technology arsenal at your hand to go in the direction that you need. And with that, I'd love to hear your thoughts, hear your questions, and I very much thank you for your time and attention.