Measuring the effectiveness of controls, adoption, and the overall performance of API governance requires different types of reporting and corresponding metrics. Reports are necessary to re/calibrate efforts and resources should they misalign the API Governance’s original intent and mandate from the corporate vision.
The purview under the API governance entity significantly influences the metrics and KPIs that it must observe. The process of data collection and aggregation from various systems for reporting is a complex undertaking. So what you wish to see reported must be carefully evaluated in terms of its ROI, particularly when just embarking on an API enablement journey.
An approach to establishing reporting capabilities for purposes of API Governance can look like this:
- Re/confirm API Governance’s purpose and objectives.
- Determine reporting scope. If the objective is to simply measure whether the compliance process is being followed, narrow the scope to that. If however, the scope must also include a roll up of API adoption and reuse data across the enterprise to justify CapEx and OpEx, the scope changes dramatically. Become more ambitious such as feeding insights to CXO levels how the API Program yielded dividends for shareholders by supporting sales or a new product launch, and you will find that the reporting requirements become highly nuanced and complex (see figure 1).
- Based on reporting scope, define who the reporting stakeholders are and what KPIs they care for.
- Formulate what metrics need to be captured that will either support or help calculate the KPIs.
- Execute a technical investigation into source systems for the metrics, data extraction feasibilities, overall solution architecture and net new capability requirements. This step can overlap with other recommended best practices in API Management, particularly centralized logging and monitoring. Synergizing across initiatives where possible should be favored over siloed approaches.
- Secure approvals and proceed to implementation.
If you want to learn more about API Governance and a practical approach to it, get in touch with us at #epam!
