APIs are entering their teenage crisis (and surprisingly, it’s good news)
Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog
API is no longer a buzz word. Adoption by companies, big and small, is growing and legitimacy is established. In fact, it seems as though APIs have lived their childhood happily, bringing value to the table, helping solve integration issues, making friends with a large community of developers, and constantly receiving praise from their adoptive parents, CIOs. To some extent it was easy for APIs to live this life as a new and important piece of the IT puzzle.
Now APIs – though not exactly teenagers anymore (happy 20th anniversary!) – are entering adolescence, and as such, it is time to find answers to typical existential questions.
Who am I? What greater purpose do I serve? What do I want to do later? Who do I want to become?
This must be seen by CIOs as an opportunity to push further the positioning and mainspring of APIs, up to enterprise strategy levels. The process is likely to be difficult, but we believe the outcome will be worth the pain. Here are three pieces of advice to help them in this transformation.
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Define your life goal: become strategic
If APIs get so much attention from birth by their developers friends and CIOs parents, it is mostly due to their capacity to enable the digital transformation of enterprises. They provide easy solutions to create new channels for customers, develop new services and products, and are agile enough to survive the new way of life of the IT world based on cloud, IoT, and AI.
But being an enabler is not enough to stay relevant on the long term. Making API a strategic asset of enterprise technology vision is a better way to ensure its profitability for the enterprise family. Therefore, CIOs should guide APIs in their quest for maturity by including the teenagers into their operating models, their governance and their organization – developing skills, processes, and responsibilities around them. Going through these stages will take a while, but this can be seen as a rite of passage to adulthood, from IT legitimacy to business legitimacy. From products that HAVE APIs to APIs that ARE products. Then everybody will see what APIs can really do, even the business uncle that never really cared about them!
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Keep an open mind to build your network
Even if APIs are instrumental to open up information systems of enterprises, they have not been introduced with the intention to help build new architecture patterns. This can be fixed, as APIs certainly have the power to be angular stones of such patterns, along with microservices. Yet everything is not plug and play with APIs. In a world with more and more APIs, interoperability issues are still a thing (perhaps more than ever) and it needs to be taken care of by the right teams. This is absolutely key to make sure data exchange and service consumption work smoothly ATAWAD, inside a company’s own IS but also outside with any API producer. To make it more tangible, we are talking about managing efficiently and simultaneously cloud2cloud, onprem2cloud, batch, real-time exchanges, with stakes of end-to-end monitoring, and other tough challenges. If these challenges are not addressed, handling data and information flow could become a burden and extend the adolescence crisis for quite some time. The fight to give birth to a state-of-the-art open, agile, and data-driven pervasive information platform is definitely worth preventing these architecture challenges from becoming jumbo quagmires.
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Focus on your inner strengths with industrialization
Just like anything that was ever created by humankind, the first APIs were handcrafted, built as unitary, template-free components. As it became clear APIs were not going anywhere anytime soon and were set to become IT standards, they needed to be, well, standardized. The first normalization and automation initiatives helped APIs grow in a structured way and tackle some (but not all) of the aforementioned interoperability topics. A good example is the https+REST+Swagger norm (OpenAPI), which is now widely adopted. Yet many issues remain, such as performance and versioning and call for a greater industrialization movement. While it should never hamper agility efforts, industrialization is essential for APIs to become strategic assets, understood, and easily used by virtually anyone, and prepare enterprises for disruptive business moves. This implies that APIs cannot remain technical objects and cannot remain IT-centric. Productization is the way to go to establish client, business, and value centricity. It means managing, marketing, monitoring, continuously improving, and all of a sudden, we are looking at business assets and no longer at IT assets! But this cannot be 100% achieved without knocking on business leaders doors, onboarding them on why this is life-changing and earning their full endorsement and engagement. If APIs are discussed in executive committees, you win (or at least you give yourself a very good shot at winning).
APIs have plenty of (good) reasons to grow and blossom and this is why enterprises need to keep elevating and nurturing them. Again the journey to make APIs strategic assets is a long one, probably specific to each enterprise but it will be a blessing for the whole organization, bringing new opportunities and business models within reach. When IT and business stakeholders find leverage and achieve unity around a common vision and framework for this journey, APIs true potential will be unleashed. Finally let’s keep in mind that this general evolution of APIs positioning is also strongly connected to recent changes in the management tools market (API gateways providers for instance) with new leaders and new players especially in Open Source; these are transformation accelerators of high importance.
Bertrand MASSON is VP at Capgemini Invent in France. Contact him to secure your API Strategy to get the real benefits from Technology and grab new revenues in the Ecosystem Business. Bertrand.masson@capgemini.com +33 6 73 71 97 54.
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