Is your digital platform doomed? Short answer is yes. But as they say in Latin, memento mori. Remember that you must die. I'm Justin Burrows. This is Commerce Chats by High Velocity.

Of course, memento mori isn't about how we die, it's about how we live and how we must prepare for what's next. In an industry in a constant state of rebirth, you must not just be prepared for platform death, but make it your strategic advantage. Today we'll talk about how e-commerce merchandisers can rise from the ashes instead of going up in smoke. I was looking at the 2010 Gartner report on e-commerce today, as one does.

Gartner, as you may know, is a management consulting company that puts out a magic quadrant of various industries, measuring providers breadth of vision and their ability to deliver. Now in the top right quadrant, designated for leaders I saw two Titans standing alone ATG and IBM WebSphere. Acquisitions and rebranding notwithstanding, those two giants stayed in that quadrant up until the 2018 Gartner report.

I was immediately reminded of a report put out precisely 200 years earlier by the management, romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which he describes the ruins of a giant statue merely two legs left, and on the pedestal these words appear. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. But nothing beside remains. Round the decay of this colossal wreck. Boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away

so in less than five years from that report, those iconic names ATG and WebSphere were consigned to oblivion, and their surviving products are mere specks in the sunset. Now listen to this Oracle, which acquired ATG announced it was going to kill the product, only having to walk it back because so many clients were so enmeshed in the platform that they simply couldn't leave. So now Oracle has said that it would effectively put the product on life support and stop development.

Think about that. They are so stuck that they use a platform that even the people who made it don't think it's worth their time. Now, there are several reasons this happens. You outgrew your platform. You shifted your strategy, so your requirements changed. Most often it's just inertia. They had a system that worked until it didn't.

But who wants to live forever? Getting trapped in a legacy platform affects not only your site performance and management, but will also affect your department. The outmoded workflows will become ingrained business processes. Entire jobs will be dedicated to mitigating limitations of the system. Your developers will have to focus their skills on dead end tech. This obsolescence will infect all parts of your organization. Curiosity dies, and your job will increasingly suck, like the perfect vacuum of space. And when the time finally comes to make a move, you will not only have technical hurdles, but cultural hurdles as well. But good news even if you are in this situation, there are things that everybody can do to either avoid or evolve out of a moribund platform.

The first thing you can do be curious. Think in terms of the work you and your teams do. Ask yourself, are you performing a task in more than one system? Are you a merchandiser or are you a data masseuse? Do integrations start breaking and then they never get fixed properly? Do you have less control now than when you started? And is there something broken and customer facing that you hate? But it is. it is what it is. You're told these are things that indicate that your system is at the end of its useful life, and this is when you can start architecting in your own mind just by asking these questions of what a better system would look like and why.

Basically, is the technology working for you making your job easier and allowing you to focus on the product and experience and the strategy Or are you working for the technology, having to intervene and intercept to keep the basic functionality working? This is useful because it takes our gaze off of the grindstone and into the future.

The second thing you can do lean forward. Forget the breathless terms transformations and revolutions. That's the language of monoliths. It has never been easier to start small Now, some start with the platforms that cause the most pain, others with those of least risk. Maybe you have the buy in to start immediately. Maybe it's not presently in the cards, but getting your head out of your current system will not only help ideas pollinate solutions, it will also help you frame your own skill set to match the current state of technology.

The third thing when integrating a new system, keep memento mori in the back of your head when designing APIs, microservices, whatever integration, whatever customization you do with the new platform, think about how those can accommodate the next system, and with the current rate of platform lifecycles, it will probably be you doing that integration.

Fourth and final thing as you update your architecture while you update your platforms, keep in mind composable commerce. That's what composable commerce seeks to address as the iteration of popular platforms and specific areas, whether they may be customer experience e-commerce, order management as each of those more and more rapidly evolve and become newer versions of themselves, you're going to do more than escape the fate of the lost souls who are stuck in a legacy product. You are going to be able to pick items that will be a fit for you platforms that will be a fit for you. You are presented with increasingly diverse options for each of these, and you can pick the one that is the perfect fit for you. And that is an incredible opportunity to provide something that really works for your customer and doesn't make your merchandisers in the day to day users on your side go absolutely crazy trying to maintain the whole thing. So this is the main reason why, when you're going through the process of creating this architecture, you need to be thinking about the next platform and the platform after that, which means being able to understand and and simplify integrations.

So to sum up, how do you get off this ghost ship?

Number one, be curious, is the tech working for you or are you working for it?

Second, lean if you can't leap, it's easy to start small and even just educating yourself about modern systems will help keep you relevant, even if your current platform isn't.

Three Memento Mori or this too will pass. Have a sunset swap plan for all your systems, even your new ones. Or update your architecture as you update your systems. Be opportunistic and simplifying how your systems talk to each other and be mindful of that.

In summation, as the writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry said, building a boat isn't about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It's about giving a shared taste for the sea.

This has been Justin Burrows wishing you Godspeed, fair sailing and High Velocity.