Digital experience composition (DXC) is having a moment: Given brands’ need to accelerate
time to market and raise the performance of digital experiences, DXC is now a hot topic among
developers, marketers, industry analysts, and DX trend watchers. Companies are looking for
solutions for not only creating and maintaining experiences, but also for rendering the workflow
equally friendly for both developers and business users.
Like any emerging software category, DXC is surrounded by a load of mystery and confusion on
what it is, what it does, and what problems it solves.
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The buzzwords
To understand DXC, first become familiar with the key terms that relate to the universe in which
DXC operates:
● Composability, which is the architecture designed to be connected to other systems so
as to make integration easier.
● API-first, which means that a system is built around APIs—not around a user interface
to which APIs are added later for integration.
● Orchestration, which is the crucial task that unleashes composable architectures so
that multiple systems can work together without having to be connected by “glue code”
generated by developers. Located on top of composable tools, orchestration enables
workflows for creating DX to span across systems.
● Digital experience platform (DXP), which accords brands the tools for building,
managing, delivering, and optimizing experiences—but not for creating and storing
content, which is the function of CMSes.
The value of DXC
Earlier this year, Gartner defined DXC as a new category whose role is to make composable
architectures practical and sustainable.
With DXC, brands can have all their composable tools—CMSes, digital asset management
(DAM) systems, customer data platforms, product information management (PIM) systems,
DXPs—work together smoothly. Plus, adding or removing tools is easy, requiring no developer
involvement at all, affording business teams a pivotal role in designing and creating digital
experiences.
DXC in action
The base layer of DXC is its foundation: the back-end systems—CMS, commerce, etc.—for
building and maintaining experiences. Note: DXC does not perform the tasks of those systems;
it just ensures that they operate in concert effectively.
DXC contains three other layers:
● The API-framework layer, located above the base layer, comprises the prebuilt
connectors that join together the layers above this one with the systems in the base
layer. This layer might include an SDK or API with which developers can build additional
connectors for a brand’s custom systems.
● The experience-builder layer, located above the API-framework layer, is the most
visible part of DXC. It’s a no-code, visual environment in which business users and other
nondevelopers can build experiences with the connected systems at the bottom through
the API-framework layer.
● The front-end orchestration layer, located at the top, makes available to consumers—
with content from the API-framework layer—the experiences that are built at the
experience-builder layer. This layer is where the front-end applications are implemented
and where connections to the systems for deploying and delivering experiences occur.
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The DXC-enabled workflow
DXC results in equal participation by both developers and business users in the creation
process of digital experiences. When composable solutions are orchestrated with DXC,
marketers can focus on their job without having to tackle “dumbed-down” developer tasks. In
turn, developers need not write code to pull content from a headless CMS, saving time for
engineering assignments.
