The Digital Fast and the Furious – API Drift

Happy New Year Ramprasad Burugu! I’m finally responding to your post on A side effect of API everywhere. Sorry for the detour with the last few posts on APIs are All About the Customer Experience, and How to Avoid Becoming Dr. Customer Experience and Mr. Digital Business, but I had to explain why companies need to focus on the customer experience, and how APIs should be all about the customer experience before talking about API Drift. (FYI. For many of my posts I am going to have cheesy titles based on movies because everyone likes movies. If I make political references, I’ll lose half the audience no matter what I do …)

The reality is IT needs to support API Drift without letting it get out of control (just like in Fast and the Furious - Tokyo Drift.) IT needs to allow different lines of businesses (LOB) and groups to own their APIs and be agile, or the LOB will go around IT. That means providing self-service for API management that allows them to discover, understand, test, publish, share, manage and change APIs in a way that’s easier, faster, and more reliable than doing it on their own. But IT also needs to centrally manage, or govern APIs, in the background, to promote reuse that keeps functionality and data consistent, and delivers better results for the business goals.

API Drift is not new. Anytime corporate IT has been too slow to address a LOB’s needs, the LOB has gone around them. In isolation, for that LOB, it made sense. IT didn’t have enough of an incentive to fix their problems, and the LOB only had the incentive to fix their own problems. Salesforce and many other SaaS vendors thrive because of this. So do Tableau, Qlik and the other departmental business intelligence vendors. So do many Big Data technology vendors.

But what’s good for the LOB is not necessarily best for the business overall, or the customer. And this time what’s best for the business is so important it cannot be ignored. Ignoring it can lead to a business extinction event. What’s best for the business is to improve the customer experience, which means to open up the business as APIs, add the intelligence to improve each and every experience across the business via those APIs, and be agile so you can change quickly. If every LOB builds their own APIs and the underlying data, integration complexity, costs, and most importantly the time to make changes goes up. You stop being agile. You also lose your consistent view of the business. And if you can’t see what’s going on in real-time, you can’t improve it.

IT really only has one long term choice, or should be given one choice. That is to provide a corporate service in the form of an API center of excellence (COE), perhaps within a customer COE (CCOE) to the LOBs that allows the LOBs to build their own APIs quickly, but lets IT promote and govern those APIs in the background. There is no benefit to any LOB that is bigger than the ability to double profits and potentially even double revenues in 5 years by doubling your loyal customer base.

Because of this, the business should also be aligned to be focused on this goal. APIs should be driven by the business as part of their top business priorities, including improving the customer experience. Digital Business, including API Management, should be driven by the business as part of these goals. If this executive sponsorship exists and is aligned with IT, it will make it easier to fund API management and a CCOE the right way, and give everyone the right incentives to do the best investment for the business and the customer. This is how you execute on a controlled API drift and win the race J