Achieve Innovation with APIs

Introduction

Innovation is guaranteed to place your organization ahead of your competitors; some of its benefits are success, recognition, awards, patents, and being on the front page of a Google search. The positive aspect of this is that your competitors will do their utmost to defeat you. Innovation is also a competition.

Innovation is driven by necessity (there are an infinite number of definitions for this; I will not go deep here). If your organization is embarked on solving necessities, you need to consider “Time to Market” as part of the necessity. If your organization innovates therefore your organization is solving necessities at the right time.

In this article, I will describe how APIs are enabling innovation in your organization by focusing on IT information services and specifically on the APIs Platform.

APIs and Innovation

APIs are enablers of innovation. But how? APIs have several attributes, one of them is Composability; this great attribute allows the creation of building blocks that reduce complexity and minimize monolithic components. These blocks enable security, data ingress, coordination of where processing data takes place, and finally, with all selected outcomes assemble a response aligned to an API specification.?

The Orchestration pattern will take care of the data flow coordination: Data, objectives to achieve, constraints to follow, algorithm (functions) needed, aggregate outcomes, and response. Orchestrator(s) move data across components in parallel or sequentially, keeping your SLAs; or in asynchronous data processing when the processing time exceeds a waiting time with a quick response that guides an API Consumer on how to retrieve later the desired response. This pattern is great for leveraging composable APIs.

If your organization has created a set of Algorithms or "functions" (and no other organization has similar products), and these are encapsulated in one or more APIs, your API platform allows just the Orchestrator to be able to make them work and generate value. Your organization has full control over your API design, code, and versioning. The Orchestrator takes care of the right input (data is aligned to its metadata definition) and later deals with responses and uses the appropriate components to build a response. Additional events (executing in parallel) will be doing tracing and insights generated. Your intellectual and proprietary algorithms will be in the background, working undisturbed and away from external observers or applications.

Composability within an Orchestration pattern takes care of Innovation, but what about “Time to Market”?

Time to Market

To achieve “Time to market” a good strategy is needed, one that considers the protection of your code, a team to develop your APIs, fosters the API lifecycle (within agile framework), always embraces changes, and drives API consumption in your organization, finally prioritization of important new enhancements in your API platform. The strategy may have many elements, but I will stress one element that it aligns to achieve Time to Market; have two development teams in your API platform: External and Internal (your organization may come up with better branding names for this), I will describe the purpose of each:

• External Team: With a focus on access needs; and adding new external features to your APIs: Design, build, and expose/adopt new metadata, support other protocols, incorporate new API Consumers (like IoT devices), and productize your API Platform; this will be the “Presentation Tier”. These teams can be “elastic”, as demand grows it can incorporate more designers/developers (contractors and/or outsource the code development) all to satisfy the API exposure to the world.
• Internal Team: This team focuses exclusively on your core business, this team knows and understands your needs, has knowledge of the available resources inside your organization, and knows how to handle and process your data; this will be the “Core Tier”. This team has full control over the algorithms (design/development) and makes those functions available to the “Presentation Tier”. This team can have a fixed size (be a small team). With iterations, keep making your algorithms stronger and better, while keeping the intellectual property safe and within your organization. Leverage all background data processing capabilities and integrate all your data among your Information systems (it has access to sources of truth).?

Product: Amazing API (Presentation)

Wizard API (Orchestrator):

1. Execute in Parallel or sequence your functions (or trigger asynchronous data processing).
2. Aggregate responses and execute Build Response.

Your Develop Team working scopes:

• External Team: Works only at Amazing API.
• Both Teams: May work at Wizard API and/or Build Response.
• Internal Team: Works only with algorithms/functions and access organization data resources and backend systems

Industry Applications

In General: Applications that perform any calculations with data, objectives within constraints, one or more algorithms; and integrating technologies like AI, RPA, ERPs, etc.

Financial: Algorithms that forecast interest rates with several generated scenarios as outcomes. Keep your backend system with accurate data.

Energy: Calculation of Gas emissions vs Energy production. Deal with the increasing number of regulations that are being imposed by governments.

Transportation: Resource allocation: Maximizing resource usage (minimizing idle times). Keep delivery times as low as possible and have profit.

IoT: On/Off devices based on sensors and monitoring devices, peak control, disaster prevention, etc.

Conclusion

If your organization invests in an API platform will benefit your clients with a unique product; accessible in different ways (Innovation) that is adaptable to new needs and technologies in a short time; it keeps the IT services demand pace (Time to Market). First, build a good Strategy, master the API lifecycle, productize your API platform (as part of your organization’s IT Services), and leverage APIs’ attributes (like Composability) to gain and maintain your organization in the spotlight.

Takeaways: API lifecycle, API design patterns.

ANNEX

Illustration - API's Composability Attribute

Composability, to describe this attribute, I will tell the versioning history of this API:

Product: FunctionA API

• 1.0: Deprecated, and no longer available for API Consumer, did not persist data and it was a powerful algorithm, but was used in a production environment.
• 1.1: Enhanced algorithm with some basic data persistence.
• 2.0: Minor enhancement in the algorithm but now uses advanced data persistence and external powerful data processing.
• 3.0: Some pre/post-processing of data, reuse algorithm version 2.0.?
• Versions 1.1, 2.0, and 3.0, remain available for API Consumer or are ready for Wizard API to expose new functionalities of FunctionA via Wizard API.

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