Introduction to the Constellation architecture

The ongoing evolution of the Pega Infinity™ architecture includes a new UI technology called Constellation. The Constellation architecture introduces a paradigm-shifting authoring experience in App Studio, designed for faster time to value and tailored for both Pega developers and contributors with less technical expertise.

A true Single Page Application (SPA) architecture, Constellation offers exceptional performance, including: 

• 3x faster interactions
• 7x smaller network payload
• 10x faster initial server response time
• 30% fewer requests on the first load

Constellation moves away from the event-driven UI that was reliant on customization, toward a paradigm of prescribed design that pulls business logic into the application workflow, resulting in Pega's first truly Center-out™ architecture. 

The following video explains more about Pega's Center-out business architecture: 

Transcript

In this series of videos, I'm going to talk to you about building a business architecture, which is a way of structuring your technology around the outcomes you want to achieve for your business and for your customers.

And in order to ensure you can both get great results fast, but also sustain that architecture into the future, we believe it's really important that you approach it from the center out. And this means avoiding some all-too-common mistakes that we see enterprises engage in when they approach their business architectures. The first mistake is starting in the channel that is things like your mobile application or your website. Maybe it's your chat bot, or a traditional contact center type channel. And when you start in the channel you end up embedding your business and your process logic directly into each channel, literally hard coding it into the channel. And this creates all kinds of silos and separations between the channels. If you've ever spent time on a company's website and then called into the contact center only to find that the poor agent on the other end of the phone had no idea what it was that you were doing or trying to do, you have smacked into one of those walls and it makes it really expensive for the enterprise. They have to code each channel independently and every time you want to make a change. You have to go and make it in multiple places, so it becomes really expensive and slow to respond to changing customer needs like the kind of world that we're dealing with right now. That is a top-down mistake.

The other mistake is starting from the bottom. With your system with databases and mainframes. ERP systems. Even modern kind of cloud-based systems sometimes fall into this because at the end of the day all of the systems down here are effectively databases and they're really built around products, siloed products, not the end-to-end customer journey. There is a huge amount of complexity down here and it's really hard and timely and expensive to try to get this to reflect what your customer journey needs to be. So, while a lot of vendors will tell you they are customer centric, they're really either channel centric or data and system centric. A truly customer centric architecture starts in the center with your customer. And more importantly, it starts with the outcomes that that customer is trying to achieve.

And then it captures the journey. Or as we like to call it the microjourney, the elements of a larger customer journey that are tied to a specific outcome. So, applying for and getting a loan is a microjourney, resolving a billing inquiry is a microjourney. And by starting in the center and working out, you're then able to have a common microjourney that runs across all your channels, so your customer gets a consistent experience. And, as a business if you want to make a change, you can change the microjourney and have that be instantly reflected across the channels. The microjourney wraps around all of the complexity and product centric mess down here at your system level and provides an easy and efficient experience for your customers and your employees. The impacts of a center outbusiness architecture are huge.

We did a study with Forrester Research on a product called the Customer Decision Hub and it's an AI brain that is really center out. It works across all channels and across all systems to make recommendations of the next best action for customers. And Forrester found that the average client over three years generated $677 million in increased revenue from using Customer Decision Hub, from applying a center-out business architecture. So, a center-out business architecture helps you avoid the mistakes of starting in the channels and starting in the systems. It can deliver incredible results. And in our next videos, we're going to talk about exactly how to build it.

You have reached the end of the video.

Development paradigm shift from customizing to configuring

Constellation introduces a new development model based on configuration, where the front-end experience—navigation, workflows, and layout—is prebuilt and optimized for productivity. Teams can focus on business logic and outcomes without reinventing the UI.

In contrast, the traditional section-based model relies on customization, giving developers full control over the UI but at the cost of heavy Rule maintenance, inconsistent designs, and complex upgrades due to Save As changes.

With Constellation, most configurations in the early stages of application development occur in App Studio. The prescribed setup ensures consistent experiences, effortless upgrades, and faster delivery of business value.

In the following figure, a developer updates the Full case View by adding a new tab with a list View, and updates the Summary data View by adding two new fields and reordering the fields. The changes are displayed in the Preview section:

 

Extending Constellation

For advanced, app-specific scenarios, Constellation allows professional front-end developers with ReactJS and web expertise to extend its capabilities. Developers can programmatically assemble Constellation’s presentational components and use the Constellation DX API to build custom experiences.

For example, if a background check workflow needs to capture a fingerprint image from a connected device, a developer can create a custom Field using DX Components. They might assemble a Constellation button and other UI elements, handle the button’s on-click event, interact with the fingerprint reader’s JavaScript API, and store the image in the case.

Future releases will expand customization options even further.

Note: For the fastest time to value and less code maintenance, it is a best practice for designers and developers to use existing OOTB Constellation templates and patterns to achieve business outcomes before creating customizations. For more information on customization with DX Components, see Creating Constellation DX components. For more information on customization in the Constellation design system, see design.pega.com.

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This Topic is available in the following Module:

• Fundamental concepts of Constellation v2