Customer 360

CHAPTER 10Composable Versus Packaged and Build Versus Buy

There was a time when a kid who wanted to play with a toy building actually had to buy a toy building. Then a Danish woodworker named Ole Kirk Christiansen invented the Lego brick. Suddenly, there was almost no limit to what could be put together from this simple building block.

In a sense, the same thing happened in software design. Over the past few decades, the computer programs we use have been “broken down” into components called services and microservices that can be assembled—Lego-style —into a wide range of different solutions.

The result is a world where technically advanced Customer 360 professionals and their IT colleagues can think about building a lot of things themselves that would have been too difficult in the past. Combined with the power of open-source software and cloud providers like Amazon and Google, the new Lego mentality makes do-it-yourself (DIY) tempting.

But is it right for your own approach to improving the customer experience? Should you avoid packaged software, strap on the tool belt, and go all DIY on your stack? The answer depends on your tolerance for risk, your team’s technical expertise, your timeline, and an understanding of the trade-offs involved.

DO-IT-YOURSELF OR DO-IT-FOR-ME?

What we’re calling Lego-brick software has a number of more technical family names, of course: API-driven, headless, and componentized. These are not synonymous, but all point to architectures that assemble ...