Regulation often aims to stabilize an industry and improve the flow of information. How? By driving interoperability among businesses in a particular industry–or among companies doing business with the government. APIs also reduce operating costs for businesses and incentivize a reusable, plug-and-play approach to delivering and operating software.
- Portals - One important aspect of industry interoperability is having familiarity with the portal landing pages consumers use to onboard with APIs.
- Workspaces - As we’ve stressed previously, it’s important to provide a single location where people can find not just APIs and documentation, but visibility into the mocking, testing, monitoring, and other elements of APIs.
- Documentation - You need to publish consistent, up-to-date, interactive, and simple documentation to inform consumers across many different providers.
- Onboarding - The onboarding process across many different APIs plays an important role in ensuring interoperability not only of the technical interface, but the human interface.
- Contracts - Contracts provide a common approach for defining technical details about the relationship between API producers and consumers across many disparate providers.
- Standards - To further stabilize the experience across APIs, define the interoperability standards used in their design, development, and operation.
- Testing - Make portable, documented, and executable contract tests available, ensuring that any stakeholder can validate whether an API is compliant.
- Certification - Offer a formal certification program for API providers, applying industry standards for API certification.
- Change - The constant change and evolution of APIs should be part of your plan.Establish a formal approach to versioning, communicating change, and updating the roadmap.
- Policies - Establish common policies to shape identity and access management, source control, CI/CD, gateways, APMs, and other parts of enterprise API operations.
The business imperative for interoperability is becoming clear. It doesn’t just assist with regulatory compliance, but brings you the agility and flexibility you need to compete aggressively in areas that matter the most to markets. You should never compete by offering proprietary interfaces to your digital resources, capabilities, and experiences. Instead, compete by offering unique experiences, while perpetually innovating and responding to markets. Interoperability will help you do this.
Providing interoperability across your increasingly sprawling enterprise landscape, as well as across the growing number of partners you depend on, should be the natural state of your enterprise. You shouldn’t choose to adopt industry API and schema standards because the government tells you to, but to benefit your own business by lowering the overhead for onboarding new partners, teams, and digital opportunities as they emerge.