You just can~t move forward an enterprise organization in a digital world without an API strategy. Establishing a formal, living, and evolving way of defining what your goals are with developing, operating, and evolving the API infrastructure behind the applications and integrations we depend on, and moving forward with a common strategy for how this all works across teams.
A formal API strategy begins with helping better define and organize some of the more business and human aspects of operating an enterprise organization. Defining logical business domains often gets introduced into API operations through the adoption of domain-driven design work in service of API governance. There are plenty of benefits in taking this formal approach, but there are some simple areas you can focus on when it comes to establishing more of a strategy for how you do APIs, without all the formality. Carving up your enterprise in logical domains, groups, and teams that fall along existing operational bounded contexts helps leadership get more of a lay of the land, from which a strategy can be developed for what might come next when it comes to these boundaries defining and shaping API operations. Drawing the lines that make up the enterprise in ways that help make API operations more precise, discoverable, and repeatable is a good first place to begin with any API strategy.
- Teams - The team of people who are behind API operations, providing name, role, and other relevant details about who they are and what they will be contributing to API operations, helping manage the human side of operations, allowing hundreds or thousands of team members to be organized and managed for optimal delivery and consumption of APIs across operations.
- Groups - Establishing a logical separate of teams, grouping by domain, line of business, project, or another bounded context that makes sense to the human part of operations, but will ultimately shape the workspaces, APIs, documentation, and other elements of API operations, helping shape the API factory floor.
- Workspaces - A virtual space for doing API work, providing a location that has a name, description, and private, team, partner, or public visibility, where work on APIs, collections, mock servers, environments, monitors, and other elements of API operations can exist, providing a single location for API producers and consumers to engage across the API lifecycle, and move APIs forward in a collaborative way.
- Goals - Have clear goals for why you are doing APIs, then asking yourself regularly if you are serving these goals across your API operations, using your enterprise goals as the North Start for every stop along the API lifecycle and governing your relationship with consumers. null
The success of your API strategy will be defined by your ability to govern how things work. Establishing an organization-wide, platform-defined API strategy should consider how operations will be governed by establishing common workspaces for teams to develop and operate APIs, what are the consistent standards and patterns that need applying as part of the design of APIs, and how documentation, testing, and security will be applied across teams. Early on in your journey to establish an API strategy you can start simple, just by writing a short narrative for how you~d like to approach governance in each of these areas, but as you progress you can get more detailed in how you provide guidance and guardrails in these areas and eventually establishing rules and tests that ensure teams are in alignment with the wider strategy. However, we must not try to boil the ocean, and just starting simple can help bring the change needed in the areas that matter most, providing teams with a simple narrative around what API governance means.
- Design Governance - Governing the shape, surface, and details of the design of any API, dictating that characteristics of each API follow existing standards and patterns that are defined as part of the Internet, within an industry, and as part of regular enterprise operations, ensuring the consistency of APIs across teams.
- Documentation Governance - Actively requiring that there is documentation available for each API, providing guidance for teams when it comes to what is expected regarding completeness and quality of documentation, and also automating the monitoring and verification that documentation exists and is up to date.
- Testing Governance - Establish guidance, rules, and tests that ensure that testing exists for APIs, making sure that all teams are developing, monitoring, and enforcing testing across all APIs in a consistent way, taking testing to another level and actually testing to make sure there is as close to 100% testing coverage in place across all APIs, going beyond governing the design of the API, but also the quality of the API in production.
- Gateway Governance -
null
Establishing standards is a big part of developing an enterprise API strategy. Identifying, understanding, and then adding Internet and industry standards to an organizations API strategy will be a regular part of this living document. Most API strategies begin as a simple fork of other API strategies that have been shared by other enterprise organizations that are brave enough to share, but then they can evolve and adapt to meet an organizations specific needs within their culture and business sector. 50% of an organizations API strategy will be defined and shaped by the Internet and industry standards, with another 25% shaped by the services and tools you adopt, but that final 25% should be all about the art of your enterprise and the domains you are experts in. You should always work to make standards the bedrock of your API strategy, as this will help you reduce friction for your consumers, and optimize your organizations ability to recruit, hire, and bring new team members up to speed.
- Internet Standards - The normative specification of a technology that is appropriate for the Internet, allowing interoperation of hardware and software from different sources which allow the internet to function, acting as the lingua franca of worldwide communications across a digital business landscape.
- Industry Standards - Industry standards are voluntary agreements that establish requirements for products, practices, or operations in a given field, providing an existing set of patterns that can be applied to the schema, APIs, and other aspects of API operations, dictating the design and delivery of APIs within specific business sectors.
- Organizational Standards - The establishment of common definitions, specifications, and patterns that help shape APIs and the operations around them, providing a set of guidance, but also services and tooling that help teams be aware of standards and put them to use when designing and delivering APIs, helping make operations more consistent and efficient. null
The ways in which you need to oeprate.
- Lifecycle - Begin locking down a common definition of what is the API lifecycle already in existence across team, mapping out how work is occurring now, then begin identifying where more enablement is needed, and how more alignment can be established across teams.
- Change - Establish a plan for how you will handle change across your API operations, addressing everything from the versioning of your APis to the turnover on teams, ensuring that as much forward momentum is maintained while also being able to change at any time.
- Distribution -