Incremental Composition: The Engine of Agility

Blog: The Tibco Blog

Organizations are constantly looking for ways to make their business operations more agile or adaptable, as this is table stakes in the new digital era. As signals, patterns, and scenarios emerge, organizations must quickly respond. This need has been present for a long time, and the time to market response is just speeding up to the point of near real time. One of the most effective responses to the “need for speed” world is incremental composition and re-composition. This incremental approach can occur during development and operations of processes and applications. This approach makes a big difference with the experimental and incremental transformation forces that have been released in the race to digital.

Compositional Development

The idea of cobbling together a process or application from existing parts with customization has been around for a long time, but we now have the tools and inventory mechanisms to catalog all the parts. In this new digital world, speed trumps perfection, so stitching together a solution that works is the first step in evolving to perfection over time. Changes could disrupt this incremental journey for near perfection. The costs of using and reusing process snippets, APIs, services, agents, cogs, forms, and sub-forms add to the momentum of incremental composition.

Incremental Operations

Today, we have the ability monitor operations in real time as well as recognize signals that indicate a need for decisions and actions. A growing number of organizations are either changing rules or reconfiguring processes and applications quickly to respond to sub-optimal performance or emerging conditions. This kind of re-configuration can be used in an incremental fashion to derive more desirable outcomes. This can be accomplished by dropping back into development mode momentarily or adjusting allowable configurations in a quick fashion, while still respecting change control and audit constraints.

Real Time Dynamic Composition (AKA Swarming)

If an organization can allow for control put at the edge of a process or application, components can automatically configure, or swarm, to meet goals and respect boundaries and constraints. Swarming will become more of an issue when organizations link the machine to machine portions of the Internet of Things (IoT), and traditional computing sped up to synch with machines. This assumes that work and resources will be quite intelligent in the way they operate. It’s edgy, but organizations are doing this today in real-time market trading systems.

Net; Net

Incremental composition and re-composition are a reality today and will stand up under the pressure of the need for more speed. Savvy organizations are leveraging them now and will continue to do more over time. As the speed increases, more auto-react and intelligent resources will become active, as humans have a hard time responding to real time. Compare it to pumping your brakes in a skid versus automated braking systems (ABS) preventing the skid.

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