The critical role of technology pros in emerging technology-free enterprises

With the rise of digital services and development tools, the time has never been riper for launching businesses — or new ventures within businesses — with composable building blocks now available through APIs, microservices and cloud platforms. In other words, IT without all the IT. Where does this leave technology professionals? 

Actually, building composable businesses means more work than ever for tech pros and managers — it just adds a new dimension to their jobs. Appropriate technologies still need to be identified, tested, implemented, and replaced. With the move to composable, “enterprises will need help at all levels – strategic consulting, business services, enterprise software, cutting-edge technologies, operations support – very little is out of scope,” Rajesh Kandaswamy, a Gartner analyst, noted. While he is more specifically addressing technology product and service leaders, this is just as applicable to individual professionals as well.

The advent of composable businesses means the technology development process will be more inclusive, suggests Matt McLarty, global field CTO and vice president of the digital transformation office at MuleSoft, a Salesforce company. I had the chance to catch up with McLarty at MuleSoft’s recent summit in New York, where he provided his latest perspectives on a topic he has been evangelizing for a number of years. 

“It’s embracing not just developers, but more builders,” he says. “The developers are going to be out of work. They’ll never be out of work. There will always be a need for gatekeepers and system thinkers to manage the stability and the interoperability of these systems. But having more people being able to inject new business ideas.”

McLarty says there are many instances of people building successful enterprises without any on-premises IT. This is especially the case with digital-native startups such as Clubhouse and Lyft. “Nobody really starts from scratch,” he says. “They built their businesses essentially reusing an API that did all the heavy lifting. You may think startups are all new cool tech. But they’re constantly looking at the landscape of what APIs are out there.”

This applies to larger, more established companies as well. “Even if companies are not necessarily making their legacy systems compostable through APIs, they’re going out to the digital ecosystem and finding capabilities,” says McLarty. “They may use Stripe, Twilio, Google Maps, and AWS for their infrastructure. They’re bootstrapping their businesses on top of all of these APIs.”

When it comes to building a composable business, “it’s not just about connecting things, it’s about how you connect them,” says McLarty. “It’s more important to be adaptable than it is to be the best at something. For companies today, things happen too fast. The last three years have taught us this more than ever that the ability to change quickly is the most important strength. And the only way to change quickly is to build your core competencies in a way that can be pivoted and used.”