Here is the situation at its simplest. A manager needs a specialist for six months. Triage works through the questions and makes the decision. That decision receives a Composer ID:
CID-12345
Now the decision starts to travel. The vendor management system raises a requisition and gives it a number of its own:
REQ-8921
Procurement raises a purchase requisition:
PR-33982
Another system opens a work order:
WO-1736
Four numbers, one decision. Each number is correct inside its own system, and none of the systems knows about the others. Months later, when somebody asks where the work order came from, the answer is usually a person with a spreadsheet, reconstructing the chain from memory and email.
The common reference
composerID’s answer is not to replace any of those numbers. Each system keeps its own identifier, because each system needs its own identifier. What composerID provides is the common reference:
CID-12345
When the decision reference is published alongside the records those systems hold, every one of them carries the same code, and the code points back to the one decision that produced them all.
What that makes possible
Questions that used to be research projects become lookups. Which of these records came from the same request? Everything carrying CID-12345. Was this spend decided properly? Follow the reference back to the decision. Did the request that started in a chat message actually result in a record? The reference is the thread between the two.
composerID is not trying to replace the identifiers those systems already use. It gives them something they can share.
Deliberately narrow
Providing the common reference is a deliberately narrow job, and that is its strength. It asks nothing of the systems involved beyond carrying one short code, and it changes nothing about how any of them work. The rest of this blog builds outward from this one idea, but the idea itself is complete on its own: one decision, one reference, every system.
Written with Claude. This post was drafted with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, working from the composerID repository: the registry, the schemas, the reference sandbox and the vendor documentation it cites. Edited and published by the composerID team.