Business adaptability

How adaptive architecture, projectional DSL and custom platforms enable true flexibility

The emergence of new business opportunities, the availability of increasingly comprehensive data and the need to adapt to constantly evolving regulatory requirements demand far greater responsiveness than ever before. However, according to Gartner, most companies are still tied to monolithic and rigid IT landscapes. These slow down innovation and make every change a lengthy and expensive undertaking.

In such a dynamic environment, the crucial question is: Are we really able to adapt quickly enough whenever the market, data or new regulations require it, without every adjustment turning into an endless development and testing marathon?

Gartner addresses this challenge with the ‘composable enterprise’ model: an organisation that accelerates innovation and adaptability by dividing its systems into ‘packaged business capabilities’ (PBCs). These are independent application building blocks that can be integrated via APIs, events and configurations. The decisive step is not only technological, but also encompasses cultural and organisational perspectives: the traditional view of applications as static monoliths must be overcome. Instead, an architecture strategy must be pursued in which flexibility becomes the most important lever for business agility.

In this context, the real competitive advantage no longer lies solely in the reliability of solutions, but in the ability to continuously reassemble, configure and expand processes, data and digital experiences in order to meet new market challenges. Adaptive architectures are thus becoming the key enabler of sustainable digital transformation.

What are adaptive architectures?

Adaptive architectures are a design approach in which systems and applications are designed to evolve and reconfigure quickly – whether due to new business requirements, regulatory changes or technological innovations.

Unlike traditional systems, which are characterised by hard-coded logic and static data structures, adaptive architectures are based on principles such as modularity, clear separation of responsibilities and centralised configuration management.

In these models, business rules, workflows, data models and integrations are no longer buried deep in the source code, but are controlled by configuration, orchestration and metadata. This enables organisations to respond quickly to external changes, securely personalise processes and services, and reduce the risk of regression. At the same time, governance is simplified through traceability and validation of changes.

Adaptive architectures are often implemented by breaking applications down into autonomous, reusable modules, as envisaged by Gartner's Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC). This is complemented by the centralisation of business rules and native support for evolutionary configurability, i.e. the ability to adapt or extend processes and models without complex deployments or extensive refactoring. In practice, this means that adaptive software systems are designed so that rules, data models, workflows and integrations can be defined and updated primarily through configuration.

This approach enables a clear separation of responsibilities. Business logic, compliance rules and data mapping can be adapted independently of the technical infrastructure. This reduces dependence on traditional development cycles. All changes are also traceable and auditable, which is beneficial for compliance and governance.

Gartner refers to this as a key feature of adaptive applications. They enable fast, secure and efficient changes to functionalities or the user experience in response to new business requirements. Such platforms support frequent changes and also enable business users to control business rules, processes and integrations themselves. McKinsey confirms that companies that rely on modular and adaptive architectures can adapt business processes and regulatory requirements much faster while reducing IT costs and shortening delivery times for new features.

From strategy to practice: Projectional DSLs as the key to adaptivity

If the concept of the ‘composable enterprise’ forms the strategic framework, the operational challenge is to provide concrete tools with which rules and processes can be configured and composed in a truly practical manner. This is where projectional DSLs come into play.

A projectional DSL is a domain-specific language in which every change is made directly to the abstract syntax tree (AST) without the need for a traditional parsing step. The user does not write text that needs to be interpreted, but works directly on the structurally valid internal representation of the domain using an editor, which can be textual, visual or hybrid. This approach completely eliminates classic parsing errors and enables features such as intelligent auto-completion, real-time validation and immediate traceability of all changes. This guarantees a valid structure at all times and allows you to work with different forms of representation (e.g. in a text, diagram or table) with full consistency.

With projectional DSLs, the business can work directly on processes and rules. This increases the quality and security of further developments and makes configurability accessible even to non-technical users.

How to implement adaptive systems: low-code platforms or customised solutions?

Today, numerous low-code and no-code platforms offer ready-to-use tools for creating modular and configurable applications. This makes it easier to get started with adaptive processes from a technical perspective.

Although these industrial solutions accelerate prototyping and shorten time-to-delivery, they often come with limitations in terms of customisation, scalability and control over the future development of the system.

For companies with complex requirements or in particularly innovative scenarios, a tailor-made strategy is therefore the more effective approach: adaptive systems that are precisely tailored to the specifics of their own domain and integrate modular architectures, advanced DSLs and truly company-specific governance tools.

This is the only way to combine maximum technological flexibility with the ability to adapt to profound and frequent changes without compromising the quality, security and governance of your digital platforms.

Our offer: we make your IT agile

adesso provides companies with comprehensive support on their journey to greater business adaptivity – from architecture strategy to concrete implementation. Our experts develop modular platform solutions that are consistently based on the principles of adaptive systems: configurable instead of hard-coded, comprehensible instead of complex, evolvable instead of static.

We use Projectional DSLs to design business rules and processes in such a way that they are directly accessible and modifiable by specialist departments – without compromising governance or technical integrity. Depending on your needs, we work with you to develop customised platform architectures or integrate existing systems into an adaptive overall structure.

Our goal: an IT landscape that not only works, but also thinks for itself – giving your business the flexibility it needs today.

Conclusion

The roadmap outlined by Gartner towards a ‘composable enterprise’ made up of modular, interoperable and configurable building blocks is no longer a passing trend, but a strategic necessity for anyone striving for innovation, shorter time-to-market and operational resilience.

Adaptive architectures supported by tools such as projectional DSLs offer a concrete answer to this challenge: they enable companies to respond quickly and with reduced risk to change and establish governance and configurability that finally matches the pace of digital business.