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Gartner found that half of the enterprise experienced a major business disruption over the past four years. Despite the growing challenges with an estimated 64% of employees able to work remotely, almost half of employees working from home currently, and more than half expecting an increase in working from home over the next year, most IT teams haven’t grown in size but their responsibilities are quadrupling. In fact, by 2024, 25% of large enterprise CIOs will be accountable for digital business operational results, becoming a sort of de facto “COO by proxy”. And according to Gartner, business composability is the 2022 mandate for technology leaders—everywhere.

So, what is business composability exactly?

Great question. Business composability is an approach empowering organizations to innovate and adapt faster in response to changing business dynamics. Business composability is based on applying key principles of modularity to business assets—achieving the speed and scale required for a thriving business.

Gartner Research Vice President, Monika Sinha coined business composability as “an antidote to volatility”. “Sixty-three percent of CIOs at organizations with high composability* reported superior business performance compared with peers or competitors in the past year. They are better able to pursue new value streams through technology, too,” she explained recently.

Gartner provides some insight into differentiating a composable mindset from traditional approaches in its 2022 CIO Agenda. Some of the standout differences include:

• Achieving business flexibility and agility, instead of just efficiency.
• Establishing value attuned to your business environment versus cutting costs on paper.
• Continuously evaluating how to distribute, plan, and respond to changing risks and market shifts rather than leveraging a static, planning-driven, approval-based approach.
• Leveraging composable (low-code or no-code services), instead of tapping into baseline conventional enterprise services only.

Gartner outlines these three action areas for business composability:

1. Composable thinking: an approach to navigate your business through future and present disruption and uncertainty
2. Composable business architecture: a blueprint for managing the pace of business change
3. Composable technologies: data, platforms, services, and systems that integrate seamlessly and quickly

We know, there’s a lot to digest here conceptually. But to sum it up in more than stats and data on how to build greater business composability and resilience, we have carved out three Q1 priorities technology leaders can tackle now to conquer their goals and business composability in 2022.

Based on the business composability requirements from Gartner, organizations must unleash the right data, platforms, and services, and systems to integrate quickly and easily. And, continually evaluating how to distribute, plan, and react to dynamic risks and disruptions is mission-critical. Identifying the right MSP can help with both when it comes to technology leaders at small-to-medium businesses. If you have an MSP that means vetting it to see if it’s a viable, modern MSP that can support and actively empower business composability.

According to a recent MicroAge survey, more than half of IT leaders leveraging MSPs are lacking support in key areas, including on the cloud, cloud services, and security. Working with a modern MSP helps to ensure that your business can proactively respond and keep pace with market fluctuations and leverage the latest technologies with a more automated no-code or low-code approach.

Watch as Kyle Yencer, VP of Services and Connected Workforce explains what makes a modern MSP on the  SMB Nation Video Podcast.

As you may have read in one of our previous blogs, for the first time in years, Microsoft is changing the way users consume and pay for six of its core M365 and 0365 plans. These changes include price changes hitting users in Q1 of 2022. Here are some action items, Rick Trujillo, MicroAge Cloud Services Director outlined for IT leaders to tackle now ahead of the change:

1. Take the time to learn about these program changes with your Microsoft provider.
2. Understand your current subscription and end dates.
3. Begin to develop a strategy for navigating these changes.
4. Consider the early adoption promotions for the Microsoft New Commerce Experience (NCE).
5. If you are a Microsoft EA customer, evaluate the transition to NCE as an option, or consider leveraging NCE for certain services in addition to your Enterprise Agreement.

You can watch Rick’s latest video blog on these upcoming changes below.

Keeping track of multiple renewal dates, providers, and payment methods can create unnecessary havoc in keeping your digital business environment online and uninterrupted. Avoid unplanned auto-renewals and late payments while keeping all of your technology investments aligned with your organization’s evolving technology strategy. Having one point of contact to manage all your software and hardware renewals helps you spend less time on IT contracts and subscriptions, freeing your team up for high-impact transformation initiatives instead. It can also protect your organization from getting hit with unplanned costs, re-certification fees, and late fees, and maintenance expenses.

Download the MicroAge Renewals brochure to learn more about how we can help.

Let’s tackle your Q1 priorities now—together.

Whether you’re concerned with business composability, or just maintaining a safer status quo in today’s connected workforce, MicroAge can partner with you to find smarter, streamlined approaches. Unleash greater business resilience and composability with outside expertise so you don’t have to wonder if you’re reacting quickly enough with the latest business technologies.

Let MicroAge guide you through the upcoming Microsoft licensing price increases and consumption changes. Finally, MicroAge can help co-term all of your technology investments to avoid unpredictable automatic renewals and unplanned outages with one, reliable point of contact.