APIs are the way of the future in IT. They free up opportunities for innovation and allow for a greater level of adaptability in your company. While some of the newest tech companies set these up rather easily, they are a bit riskier and more complicated for companies that are already established. In an article for the Enterprisers Project, Barry Libenson uses his experience as a CIO for Experian to give the ingredients for API success:
- Focus on talent.
- Get team buy-in.
- Enable collaboration.
- Ensure governance.
Cooking up Quality
Libenson says the first step is focusing on talent by finding the best team for the job:
Precursors to this development approach include things like DCOM, Publish and Subscribe, and Corba. The big difference is the simplicity by which the recent wave of distributed compute capabilities can be implemented. Software developers can pick up this approach more quickly and many universities are teaching these concepts to computer science majors. Architecture is slightly more challenging since understanding how to connect various components and leverage external third party services can be simple or extremely complex, depending on what is being built. Having said that, most strong architects understand the need to embrace the model for scalability and portability and as a requirement to meet customer needs.
While finding the right people for the team is a big part of this process, ensuring buy-in of this team is equally important. Feeling invested in the project takes some work, so make sure developers are in on the vision for the project. Including them in how the project will function in the company as a whole will help address issues early on, as well as increase buy-in.
Another part of API success comes with enabling collaboration. This extends not only to humans collaborating with other humans, but with bots as well. AI and humans can yield great results when paired up, so make sure the opportunity is there into the future. The final ingredient of success is ensuring governance. Make sure everyone is following the same data management model so everyone is receiving the same results.
You can view the original article here: https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2017/7/experian-cio-4-ingredients-api-success
