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Centralization

Centralizing practices and information across the enterprise organization helps streamline and standardize teams’ work. Centralization provides the consistent nutrients teams need to be successful and allows disparate groups to produce consistent and valuable services.

Elements

  • Excellence - Set up a center of excellence, bringing together all necessary knowledge, skills, and practices and working to evangelize them across domains and teams to facilitate awareness, participation, and feedback.
  • Expertise - Create a central group of leaders with different areas of expertise. Make sure they meet regularly to identify and evolve the knowledge and practices teams need to be successful.
  • Leadership - Establish clear leadership for centralized governance, taking a lead role in demonstrating how and why API governance matters. You can do that without ever having to say the word “governance” or being seen as an enforcer.
  • Domains - Thoughtfully carve the enterprise into logical domains that reflect, but transcend tribal boundaries that emerge from lines of business and legacy acquisitions. Establish clear articulations of your business domains.
  • Vocabulary - Define the common vocabulary used within domains, using the language teams will use when designing APIs. Also engage with consumers of those APIs, making producing and consuming APIs as intuitive as it can possibly be.
  • Rules - Craft and evolve linting rules across domain contracts and artifacts, encouraging teams to apply them. They can even be applied as part of policies used across gateways and other stops along the life cycle to help stabilize API operations.
  • Enablement - Provide the best possible services, tooling, standards, and other resources for teams, making it easy for them to deliver and operate consistent APIs, no matter which team created and owns them.
  • Feedback Loop - Foster an active two-way feedback loop with teams, encouraging feedback on governance. Allow teams to dictate the evolution of centralized guidance as it is applied on the ground across federated API teams.

How centralized your governance is will vary according to your company’s structure, culture, and industry. This is the reality on the ground. It is also the reason you should have ongoing conversations with teams as part of your governance feedback loop.