Marketing is an increasingly central driver of the growth and success of professional services firms. This is pushing firms to rethink their digital marketing infrastructure and how it can be reshaped to meet the new and ever-changing challenges and opportunities.

There is a growing consensus that the technology behind a firm's digital presence needs to break free from the traditional "build and burn" monolithic approach that has prevailed in professional services which required firms to rebuild their website, bios, content hubs, media center, and often brand once every five years or so. 

The reason for the rebuild is often that the entire website stack is essentially a single, rigid service with many, if not all of the services being delivered by a central supplier. Hence it is extremely difficult to swap small portions of the presence in the face of inevitable change. The only way to keep up to date is to "burn" the old site and rebuild a new one. 

Composable architecture takes a different approach, creating a website from a series of best-fit services that can be added to or removed without any disruption and are delivered through a separate thin presentation layer (at which point the services are referred to as "Headless").

What is Composable Architecture?

Traditionally, firms have built their websites using tightly coupled front-end code (user interface) with back-end code (database and server-side logic). This "monolithic" framework gets in the way of efforts to change and modernise the website, as even small changes to the front end may require significant modifications to the back end. 

Composable architecture offers a solution by decoupling the front-end and back-end code, resulting in faster and easier development. This approach often utilizes a headless CMS, with an API for the front-end code to fetch data. By separating concerns, the front end and back end can be developed independently, simplifying deployments.

The Benefits of Composable Architecture to professional services firms

Composable architecture offers several benefits, primarily because it allows individual components to be developed and tested independently before they are integrated. 

These benefits of composable will be particularly useful in services firms, where scaling, adapting to new market expectations, and meeting internal stakeholder requirements with limited resources are key challenges.

The modular nature of composable architecture simplifies scalability since new functionalities can be added as needed without requiring a complete overhaul of the entire site. Moreover, composable architecture excels in resilience, as individual components can be updated or replaced without impacting the entire system.

This agility means that composable architecture proves to be more cost-effective, reducing the development time and effort required for both creation and maintenance.

Composable as the future:

According to Gartner, by 2023:

• 60% of mainstream organizations will list composable business as a strategic objective
• 60% of organizations will seek composability in new application investments 
• organizations that have adopted composable will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation

An agile, modular infrastructure behind marketing efforts gives marketing the capability to change and adapt to new requirements and market expectations with minimal effort - keeping the focus on leading the firm and delivering results.

Professional services firms that decouple their front-end and back-end code will be able to develop and deploy more efficiently, adapt quickly to market changes, and deliver the exceptional user experiences needed to thrive in the market.