With your preparation and planning complete, the final stage is to build your ecosystem. Remember what you’ve learned up to this point. Your initiative must align with overall corporate strategy, solve existing problems, enable more effective compliance and provide information for data-driven decision-making.
Ongoing ecosystem management
Consider first how you will manage your API ecosystem — what happens after day one? How will you build, launch and incorporate new APIs? What measures do you have in place to nurture the short-term and long-term growth of your ecosystem? How will you future-proof your investment after the transformation journey is complete? “Staying competitive is not so much about how many applications you own or how many developers you employ,” reads Deloitte’s API-Enabled Digital Ecosystems. “It is also about how effectively you trade on the insights and services across your balance sheet.” An API management platform is one of the most crucial tools. By leveraging a centralised solution to manage your API ecosystem, you stand to increase efficiency, deliver cost savings and more.
“The communication channel between the application development team and the API team should always be kept open to create APIs which are robust, reliable and reusable across multiple applications.”
Siddharth Katare Senior Solution Architect HCL Technologies Learn more about Siddharth →
“When implementing an API-first approach, businesses need to think about naming conversion, how wide or narrow the scope of functionality the API will be, versioning, and the API decommissioning strategy. These are crucial elements.”
Sachin Shah CTO Learn more about Sachin →
Consider your evolving culture
In discussing tools and development, it can be easy to overlook the most important element in API management: people. As we’ve established, you must complete a thorough review of your workforce at the outset, including skills and areas of weakness. If there is a skills gap, it will likely become progressively more pronounced as your journey continues.
We need to think beyond the launch. What needs to happen to continuously improve, continuously get feedback, analyse and then build again? It’s an iterative cycle which requires a new way of conceptualising your product.
People and culture are the heart of an API-first journey. The right mindset and culture are both crucial, making the entire process more efficient and beneficial. Aside from securing buy-in for the journey, cultural alignment will also make it easier for your business to recruit the necessary personnel to further its transformation. Ultimately, putting the emphasis on people rather than processes, tools, or the tech stack puts the entire journey in clear focus — and makes it much more likely to succeed.
Key points
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An API-first ecosystem requires ongoing management beyond launch.
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Focusing on people and culture is at the heart of an API-first journey and ecosystem.
“The use of monitoring tools to understand how public and private APIs are used offers key metrics around customer adoption and utilisation. The insights generated can be useful in determining monetisation strategies for products and services.”
Debu Sinha Senior Specialist Solutions Architect Databricks Learn more about Debu →