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Composable Business Architecture (CBA) is a business architecture approach and methodology that emphasizes flexibility, adaptability, and modularity in designing and organizing the components of a business. It is a response to the ever-changing and complex nature of the business environment, where organizations need to be agile and responsive to rapidly evolving market conditions and customer demands.

“Composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks” - Kasey Panetta, Gartner Contributor

The same way a Lego brick is the basic building block of any Lego masterpiece, a Packaged Business Capability (PBC) is the basic building block of a composable business model.  Each of the enterprise PBCs fulfills a critical function of the business.

“Composable business is a natural acceleration of the digital business that you live in every day. It allows us to deliver the resilience and agility that these interesting times demand.” - Daryl Plummer, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner.

Gartner identifies, four principles of composable business architecture:

• Modularity - dividing the business domain into smaller discrete components with clearly defined responsibilities

• Autonomy - ensure the individual components are as independent as possible from other components in order to minimize dependencies and enterprise impact when one component needs to be changes or replaced

• Orchestration - the process and tools used to control the flow and collaboration among the individual business components in order to achieve specific business objectives

• Discovery - the ability to easily find and understand existing business process and component assets within the enterprise to facilitate reusability and for quickly composing new processes for in response to opportunities or business landscape changes

“An organization that delivers business outcomes and adapts to the pace of business change. It does this through the assembly and combination of packaged business capabilities… application building blocks that have been purchased or developed.” — Gartner

When it comes to establishing composable businesses, Gartner defines three essential building blocks, as follows:

• Composable thinking - Composable thinking is an adaptable problem-solving approach that involves breaking complex challenges into modular components, allowing for flexible and creative recombination to address evolving needs, fostering innovation and efficiency. It emphasizes modularity, reusability, and customer-centricity in finding solutions and is relevant across diverse domains, including technology, business, and product development.

• Composable technology - Composable technology refers to an IT infrastructure and architecture approach that leverages modular components and software-defined resources, enabling organizations to dynamically and flexibly allocate computing, storage, and networking resources to meet specific application or business requirements. This approach enhances agility, scalability, and resource utilization in a rapidly changing technology landscape, allowing organizations to adapt quickly to evolving needs and opportunities.

• Composable business architecture - Composable Business Architecture is a strategic framework for designing and organizing a business's components, such as processes, capabilities, and technologies, in a modular and flexible manner. It enables organizations to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, customer demands, and emerging opportunities by promoting modularity, reusability, and interoperability in their business operations.

Composable Business Architecture is particularly relevant in industries characterized by rapid change, digital transformation, and the need for continuous innovation. It helps organizations stay competitive and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges by providing a framework for designing and organizing their business components in a flexible and adaptable manner.