According to the “State of the Connected Customer” study by Salesforce, 84% of customers say that the experience a company offers is just as important as the products and services themselves. The study highlights that personalized experiences are a key factor in customer loyalty. For this reason, headless solutions have been increasingly interesting for several years for industries where responding to the needs of potential customers, the brand experience and flexibility to react to trends are important success factors. There are several things to consider during implementation:
Challenge 1: Find a starting point
For many companies, the switch from a monolithic architecture to a headless or composable architecture means a fundamental change in the way their e-commerce processes work and the way the team functions. Whereas in the past all store management tasks were handled in one solution, now several systems have to work together and different tasks have to be carried out in different processes. This is a big change for many company teams and requires a great deal of commitment from all sides in order to be successful.
An early “go-live” of the first services or stores is one of the most important milestones - which is why the decision of how and where to start has a major impact on the entire process.
Solution strategy: Creating a common understanding of the current architecture.
The need for change usually arises from some pain points within the existing solution that limit the impact on what can be offered to end customers on the store or website interfaces. To find a starting point to eliminate these pain points, the first step is to analyze the existing solution and all involved services. diva-e helps with architecture analysis in pre-project phases to create a common understanding. With this clear picture, the most critical pain points can be addressed in order to define a new vision of an architectural landscape. Based on this, it is determined which parts need to be tackled first and what can be done in parallel.
This scope should include all technical and non-technical stakeholders and align to a vision where everyone benefits from a new flexible and scalable, composable solution.
Challenge 2: Scaling to the right size and maintaining an overview
Composable solutions offer much more flexibility and options to parallelize work, but also many more services to decide on and responsibilities to define. There will probably be several project streams that need to be orchestrated into a subordinate vision. For example, there will be project streams for product information management (PIM), fulfillment and store front-end development that are interdependent and need to be aligned to avoid delays. Project management needs to keep up and find the right number of work streams, teams and projected costs to achieve a specific goal on time.
Solution strategy: Early introduction of program and project management and application of agile methods
With composable solutions and headless frontends, scaling teams is easier compared to monolithic architectures. Achim Settelmeier, Senior Expert System Architect & Team Lead, reports on a recent project:
“Headless was the only way to scale in these regions in terms of team size. A monolith would have been logistically impossible for our project with twenty front-end developers working in three teams. In the overall context of 300-500 project participants in all areas (PIM, CRM, fulfillment, picking), only the headless approach allows us to orchestrate the projects effectively.
This agile methodology, which is used in all diva-e projects, helps to rationalize the workforce in order to achieve major goals.
Challenge 3: Don't underestimate organizational change
In addition to the technical changes, it is not only important to define the responsibilities for the services, but also to involve all stakeholders and their teams to minimize internal resistance. The change may also impact business teams within organizations that are responsible for specific parts of the digital landscape. (e.g. sales for e-commerce, marketing for the website).
You can find out more about what agile change management can look like here.
Solution strategy: Involve all stakeholders and let them help shape the digital future of your company.
As outlined in Challenge 1, a clear picture of the vision is just as important as an architectural diagram of what the company is aiming for. At this point, involvement and the definition of responsibilities as well as a rough roadmap are essential. Co-creation and building shared benefits for the individual departments as well as for the company as a whole are crucial here. Another success factor that can be observed in some companies is cross-functional teams based directly in the business departments.
Challenge 4: Be up to the demands of tomorrow.
The environment is changing rapidly, not only inside the organization, but also outside. It is therefore important to be prepared for tomorrow's requirements when planning a new architecture. For example, with the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the Barrier-Free Strengthening Act (BFSG), laws will come into force in 2025 that require B2C stores to comply with standards.
Likewise, users are dealing with the megatrends of neo-ecology and individualization and expect to be able to access your brand's services from anywhere at any time.
Solution strategy: Include both regulatory issues such as accessibility and trends in your planning.
By decoupling the frontend and backend, high-performance and individual frontends can be realized. By using modern front-end frameworks in combination with modern e-commerce systems, diva-e can already lay the foundation for many requirements using accelerators in order to focus on important future topics such as accessibility and web performance during implementation.
In order to be optimally prepared for these new mandatory requirements today, you have the option of carrying out an accessibility audit with us. Find out more here.
Challenge 5: AI will revolutionize everything Content
No topic polarizes the media as much as artificial intelligence. Over the next few years, there will be an endless number of use cases that companies can use to market their products and services in a more targeted way. The possibilities for creating individual experiences for users with your brand are almost limitless. But how can such potential be exploited in the foreseeable future?
Solution strategy: Use the potential of artificial intelligence today.
As the name suggests, composable architectures consist of a composition of several services and tools that are combined into a high-performance solution in order to combine the best components to solve a problem. This type of architecture makes it possible to integrate additional services with little effort. In this way, the potential of AI can be flexibly exploited at very short notice. diva-e is already integrating solutions for customers in composable architectures in order to address specific problems with AI and offers its own AI hub for the individual requirements of companies in all industries. Our customers benefit both from current AI developments and from our expertise in implementation. With our venture clienting approach, we use solutions from B2B tech start-ups that have already proven themselves on the market and implement them seamlessly in the context of the respective customer project.
This means that we use the innovation potential of many start-ups in an AI hub ecosystem to develop and provide customized best-of-breed solutions.Find out more here.
You can find specific recommendations for action in our white paper Headless revolution in retail.
