Preparing for Digital Transformation: How to Get Ready for a Move to MACH

Last year was rocky in tech. However, despite a slowdown in the industry, investments in digital transformation are growing — the global market is expected to reach $6.8 trillion by 2032.

Forward-thinking organizations are looking to MACH-based (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless) and composable architectures to gain complete control over their digital commerce ecosystems. According to research from the MACH Alliance, 75 percent of decision makers feel it’s more urgent for their company to innovate now than it has been in the past five years.

Moving from a monolith or homegrown solution to a modern, modular tech stack brings flexibility and scalability to commerce platforms. However, transitioning to a new way of working doesn’t just happen by accident — at least not successfully. From securing project approval to executing a winning transformation plan, each step on the journey to MACH needs to be carefully considered and planned.

Secure Buy-In

Before you can even contemplate a winning approach to digital transformation, your organization needs to agree to undertake one. To secure stakeholder support and organizational buy-in, the first thing I recommend to customers is find your "North Star."

Aligning the team around a shared vision of the future gives you two crucial pieces of the puzzle in one. First, it rallies everyone around what can be achieved from the outset. Second, it helps maintain perspective when inevitable hiccups arise once the project is underway.

The next step is to assess the current state of your tech stack and processes, and identify the biggest pain points. What’s keeping teams and departments from achieving strategic objectives? Where does technology hamper more than help? Ask department heads and individual contributors their opinions to ensure you get an accurate idea of what is and isn’t working.

From there, begin to build your base of support. Start with the departments that have the most ground to gain — like marketing and merchandising — and paint a picture of what greater content control, for example, would mean for them. Once they’re on board, you can use their support to rally the troops across the organization.

Plan the Plan

With the foundation set — the vision in place and leadership support gathered — you still need to create the conditions for success in the actual implementation. A clearly articulated plan, with well-defined stages and clearly mapped responsibilities, is table stakes. There are three considerations on top of your workback that are paramount to success:

1. Conduct a pre-mortem.

Before you start any implementation work, identify where there are risks. Push one another to identify potential problems and take the time to dig into them, even if they seem unlikely to occur or unimportant. Surfacing issues now means you can mitigate against them, instead of having to backtrack on days, weeks or even months of work down the line.

2. Build cadences.

Sprint planning, retrospectives, and especially reporting back to stakeholders (and the team) all need to be on a regular, predictable cycle. People want to know the status of the project. Establishing cadences for these recurring events means everyone stays on the same page.

3. Prioritize teams.

Technology isn’t the only thing being transformed: your entire organization will need to revamp how work is done. Proactively identify skills gaps and create plans for upskilling current team members or hiring to fill new needs. Be transparent about what teams should expect and keep them in the loop on progress. Identify “super-users” — the boots-on-the-ground platform users the rest of the team leans on when they can’t figure things out. Get them involved, trained and convinced of the benefits as early as possible; they'll be your best advocates for widespread adoption.

Keeping pace with the rate of change is an increasingly challenging undertaking, as consumer expectations and technological advances move the horizon line further away each day. A move to MACH can enable brands to create a truly unified commerce experience, but ensuring your brand is MACH ready takes thoughtfulness and planning.

Jason Cottrell is the CEO and founder of Orium, North America’s leading composable commerce consultancy and system integrator.