There are few people IMHO that have the level of insight into what’s going on in the world of Marketing Technology like Scott Brinker does. In his recent episode of Google Firestarters, Scott talks about two related but critical overarching trends in martech: composability and orchestration.
Composability describes the ability of businesses to far more easily construct bespoke technology capabilities through the step change in malleability provided by APIs, fluid data flows, and no-code software and interfaces. As Scott says:
‘The idea of “composable software” is that smaller software building blocks — API services, functions, data sources, UI elements, etc. — can be assembled together like Lego pieces to craft tailored digital processes, employee experiences, and customer experiences that are unique to your business. They can be easily rearranged as needs shift and opportunities arise.‘
This lego construction of technologies, apps, interfaces and workflows allows for much greater flexibility and the creation of tailored technology solutions and capabilities which are more unique to that business. In this world competitive advantage will come from ‘orchestration’, or how the different component parts are combined to make it easier for teams to create brilliant experiences and marketing. In Scott’s words: ‘…integrating your tech stack is only the first step. To really unlock the power of your apps and platforms, you need to orchestrate business processes across them’. The importance of these trends has only recently been super-charged by the introduction of plugins for ChatGPT which can draw from proprietary business data and the Zapier plugin in particular which heralds the ability to more easily automate workflows across a broad range of apps through GPT capability. The way in which we design and implement workflows around technology is changing forever.
I think these two complementary trends are an excellent way to express one of the key areas of challenge (and opportunity) in the modern marketing team – how to design and construct technology capability, and more importantly the workflows that can capitalise on it, in ways that enable strategic advantage combined with ease of execution, agility and continuous improvement. Anyway, Scott describes it far more eloquently that I can so do watch his episode:
Leave a Reply