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API-Early

Enterprise organizations who are early on in their API journey are doing APIs, but just not doing APIs in any strategic, observable, or governable way. Leaving a pretty chaotic and unknown landscape of digital services that are powering a mix of web, mobile, and device applications, while cobbling together integrations across internal and external systems.

Elements

These are the elements of API-Early.

  • Strategy - There isn’t much of a strategy to be found, and while all teams are doing APIs, they are left to their own devices for designing and operating APIs.
  • Discovery - There is no central place for finding APIs at any point in the API lifecycle, resulting in a lot of redundancy in the APis behind applications.
  • Applications - Desktop, web, and mobile applications are the priority when it comes to development, but the APIs behind them operate in the shadows, unseen except by anyone except developers.
  • Visibility - There is a lot of anxiety about exposing APIs externally, even to trusted partners, because the organization lacks experience in securing and managing them over time.
  • Quality - The quality of APIs is very low and generally unpredictable, leaving trust in teams and the APIs they produce low in the eyes of internal, partner, and public consumers.
  • Security - There is a centralized security group, but it has difficulty securing what is unseen.There is no standard for security across teams, but they continue to launch APIs as needed.
  • Productivity - Teams spend a lot of time reverse engineering existing APIs, trying to debug them and learn how they work in order to evolve.Most new APIs are delivered via code-led approaches.
  • Velocity - The speed at which teams produce new APIs or enhance existing ones is very unpredictable, making planning and road maps difficult to communicate and achieve.
  • Observability - Teams do not have much visibility into the health of individual APIs, let alone APIs at scale across the organization or l the operations behind the APIs in production.
  • Governance - There is no consistency present across APIs. They all use different patterns, with a lack of standards leaving leaders unable to control the state of operations.
  • Standards - There is a lack of awareness of the internet and industry standards. There is no group helping to define and evolve internal organizational standards across teams.
  • Regulations - Government regulations are seen as a never-ending source of friction and obstacles the enterprise must overcome, always preventing operations from moving forward.
  • Innovations - There is no room for innovation. All teams are expected to spend all of their time putting out fires, and there is no time and no resources to spend developing new ideas.

Many enterprise organizations find themselves in an API-early state. Depending on the industry, and other market forces, companies find themselves way behind when it comes to seeing the API signs along the road over the last decade. There is nothing wrong with being here, and there is not time like the present to begin investing in all of these areas.