If you are a company with valuable, unique online capabilities that you are not exposing to other companies as REST JSON APIs, then stop reading and go read any of 1,000 articles about why you are probably making a huge mistake. When you are ready to join us in the 21st Century, read on. 2013 is being called the year of the API…figure it out.
If you do offer APIs but aren’t using API Management, wow…that’s a lot of work. Probably you’re working too hard and making the business decision around exposing APIs too slowly to be nimble in the API Economy…and nimbleness is what the API Economy is all about.
Let me tell you my story: As the CEO of a company in ground transit, my team had developed a series of really amazing services on a very difficult, esoteric platform that very few developers knew. We were using these services internally to enable our ground transit application. One day, it occurred to me that we should offer these services to other companies needing to do similar things. The problem was that doing so at that point, with no easy way to expose, manage and promote the services, was going to be a Board-level decision…about three months of effort, not to mention the siphoning of executive focus (namely mine) from our core business. So we decided to wait and continue using the technology internally.
If we had started from the very beginning with API Management, we would have been able to make our services open to the developer community with just days of effort and minimal executive time…enough to quickly offer services and see which ones were compelling enough for developers to use and pay for…a key to the notion of validated learning that any good Lean Startup today understands.
To this day, I wonder what opportunities we left behind there at that moment of non-decision, opportunities that might have far surpassed our business in ground transit? What if we had released our APIs and companies all over the world started using our services to enable entirely different business models? Then I could have gone back to my Board with real data on how our services were being used and what people were paying for…and data-driven meetings are the best ones.
Today, I work with many companies who have public APIs and manage them through IBM and others’ API Management offerings. But too often, I learn that the data coming from the API Management dashboard never makes it to the CEO and other decision-makers, or those reports aren’t presented and perceived as strategic intelligence that can help executives see where to move the company.
HP famously has a saying: “If we only knew what we know.” If you have API Management working in your company, you have the data to make better, faster, more confident decisions…if business decision-makers know what you know.
API Management data is pure gold. Don’t waste it.