B: Composable Business¶
Making the enterprise adaptive through modular knowledge and reusable capabilities
Objective¶
A composable business is one that can adapt and reconfigure itself continuously — not through massive reorganisations or costly rewrites, but through modular, reusable, and semantically connected components.
Composable Business is the organisational expression of the Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) and the Use Case Tree (UCT) method. It represents the ability to assemble business capabilities dynamically from trusted, reusable building blocks: use cases, data products, stories, workflows, and ontologies — all governed within the EKG.
Why It Matters¶
Most organisations struggle to change because their systems, data, and processes are tightly coupled and fragmented. Innovation requires coordination across dozens of silos, each with its own models and assumptions.
Composable Business replaces this fragility with semantic modularity — every business capability becomes a governed component that can be reused, combined, or replaced without breaking the whole.
The result:
- Faster adaptation to market or regulatory change
- Continuous innovation without re-engineering core systems
- Resilience through modular design
- Clarity and governance through shared semantics
The Role of the Use Case Tree (UCT)¶
The Use Case Tree (UCT) is the organising structure of composability. It defines how business capabilities are decomposed into modular use cases, each of which can be modelled, implemented, and run independently, yet still fit coherently into the enterprise architecture.
Every node in the UCT represents a reusable component — a semantic package containing:
- Defined outcomes and personas
- Stories (tool functions or APIs)
- Data products and ontologies
- Workflows and policies
This makes the UCT the semantic package manager of the EKG — similar to how npmjs.org or pypi.org manage software packages — but at enterprise scale, spanning business, data, and knowledge assets.
Composable Business vs. Reuse Enablement¶
Two sides of the same semantic coin¶
While Composable Business and Reuse Enablement both aim to make the enterprise modular, they operate at different levels of abstraction. The table below outlines how they relate and reinforce one another within the EKGF Method.
| Aspect | Composable Business | Reuse Enablement |
|---|---|---|
| Focus / Orientation | How business capabilities are composed, orchestrated, and evolved | How knowledge assets and components are packaged and shared |
| Primary Question | "How do we assemble business capabilities from reusable parts to adapt to change?" | "How do we design those reusable parts so they can be assembled safely and meaningfully?" |
| Scope | Business and operational level — orchestrating Use Cases, Personas, and Stories into composable outcomes. | Technical and semantic level — creating and governing reusable artifacts: ontologies, datasets, shapes, workflows, data products, and Stories. |
| Key Mechanism | Use Case Tree (UCT) as the orchestration layer: composing and aligning modular business capabilities. | Use Case Tree (UCT) as the packaging layer: publishing reusable components and metadata to the Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) for discovery and re-use. |
| Relationship to the EKG | The EKG provides the shared semantics and service interfaces that make cross-use-case orchestration possible. | The EKG provides the shared identifiers, ontologies, and provenance that make reuse safe and traceable. |
| Value Proposition | Agility and adaptability: the ability to reconfigure the enterprise dynamically in response to change. | Efficiency and consistency: the ability to reduce duplication and accelerate delivery through reusable, versioned components. |
| Primary Users | Business and solution architects; transformation leads. | Data and knowledge engineers; ontology and platform teams. |
| Outcome | Composable business capabilities and adaptive workflows. | Reusable semantic components and data products. |
| Relationship to Each Other | Composable business depends on reuse. Without reusable components, there is nothing to compose. | Reuse finds purpose in composability. Without higher-level composition, reuse is just technical hygiene. |
Two sides of the same semantic coin
Reuse Enablement creates the building blocks.
Composable Business assembles them into living systems.
Every successful technology ecosystem has a way to share reusable components — the JavaScript world has npm with over 3.5 million packages, the Python world has PyPI with over 600,000 packages, and so on — each enabling developers to build upon a vast ecosystem of reusable components.
The Use Case Tree (UCT) plays the same role for the Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG): it is the semantic package manager that makes every business capability, data product, and workflow discoverable, versioned, and ready to be reused and composed safely across the enterprise.
Getting Started¶
To move toward a composable business:
- Model your business capabilities using the UCT — define outcomes, personas, and dependencies.
- Publish reusable components (stories, data products, ontologies) to the EKG with clear provenance and semantics.
- Compose new capabilities by linking and orchestrating existing components rather than building from scratch.
- Govern the lifecycle of use cases and their subcomponents — versioning, approval, and retirement all managed within the EKG.
- Measure reuse and adaptability as key indicators of enterprise maturity.
Related Objectives¶
Summary¶
Composable Business is not a new methodology — it is the natural outcome of applying the EKGF Method. When business capabilities, data products, and knowledge artifacts are structured and governed through the EKG and the UCT, the enterprise itself becomes composable: a living system of reusable knowledge, ready to evolve continuously.
Author: Jacobus Geluk