APIs - are they the driving force in successful #digitaltransformation efforts?

The buzzwords of yesterday - the transformation of today

As organizations strive to improve and drive the customer experience, they are going through a digital transformation focused on leveraging some of the latest trends at their disposal to help keep and grow their customer base — mobile, cloud and Internet of Things (IoT). They are finding that in this journey, no one is starting from scratch with an ideal backend to deliver the services and apps for mobile and cloud, for example. A lot of companies going through this digital transformation have legacy systems that have been inherited after years of business prosperity. They don't have the luxury of just throwing them all away and starting from scratch, like most startups have. Therefore, previous efforts at addressing complexity in the backend may have resulted in a service-based architecture pattern.

This resulting SOA infrastructure likely consisted of applications exposed only to other internal applications, delivered on various distributed platforms, connected via adapters to enterprise service bus (ESB) layers and exposing XML-based Web services over HTTP. The problem is, in a digital world, these services are not easily consumed by today's mobile app developers. Like agile, unfortunately, these are the buzzwords of yesterday — SOA, ESB and legacy. 

But this is the reality of a digital transformation. The key to success is figuring out how to transform without throwing out existing investments, infrastructure or the systems that contain a world and wealth of data.

Like websites, shop-fronts and call centres, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) could be viewed as simply another channel for delivering services online. APIs power many of today’s websites and mobile apps, and are becoming increasingly important in the digital economy. This is because APIs can be incorporated into downstream applications, whereby third-parties reuse and recombine them in creative ways. Good APIs strip a digital service down to its simplest possible form, so that the value of the service can be amplified through third-party reuse.

In a larger sense, APIs are the secret sauce to becoming digital, that is, to transform the business so that innovation can happen at a faster pace, so that barriers to change are reduced, so that many more people can contribute to the company’s success, and so that you can create better products and defend yourself from the competition.

User-centred design isn't just for web design - it is also for API design

The principle of user-centred design is at the core of digital transformation efforts. Design and build components that enhance the user experience. If it doesn't enhance or make the user experience more defined - simply don't do it.

Can a user consume a digital service without bad design getting in their way?

Getting this right requires empathy and an understanding for users, backed by evidence of user-preferences. Although a well known principle, it is not always well practised - especially in the website development space. Often the "we have conducted user workshops and have come up with this user-centred design" is over shadowed by "we think this new, cutting edge, polished design will work well". In some ways, developer empathy is exactly the same; developers are people too, and the users of APIs. The key difference is that when developers use an API, they often create additional value for many people. A well designed end-user experience results in a single good user experience. A well-designed API on the other hand can result in many good user experiences, often enjoyed by those the original service designer did not envision.

There is a need for API standardisation and sharing of best practice

Domo, the world's leading innovative business cloud intelligence provider, that provides over 1000 pre-built data connectors to third party apps (such as Facebook, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Netsuite, Marketo, Google Analytics etc) has noticed a trend in API development. The innovative tech leaders at Domo have noticed that we are moving from a world where many application and data providers publish APIs (approaching 15,000, according to ProgrammableWeb) that provide inconsistent methods and levels of access to data to a world of automatic discovery, traversal and use of data. To make it easier for businesses to leverage their data, Domo has kicked off an initiative to bring together key stakeholders in the data economy to promote the use of best practices and establish standards for APIs.

The step that Domo has taken is congruent with their strategy around;

Core to The Business Cloud are developer tools and programmatic APIs that enable anyone to build and deliver apps

Domo believes that by providing a open forum at which developers can begin to discuss and collaborate on the standards at which APIs should be developed at, it will enable the expansion of their 'connectors' with more users being able to connect Domo to any data source. This is ultimately the dream of digital transformation - being able to transform with minimal disruption to the business. Whether it's creating new sources of revenue in the front-office, or unlocking data siloes on the backend, APIs are at the heart of an company's digital initiatives and its resulting successes

Good API design begins with good collaboration

User empathy is focused on ergonomics at the point of delivery. Developer empathy is focused on painless systems integration. Good API design is still fundamentally about ergonomics, but the context is different. As a user, successful UX and design has the quality of affordance. In UX design obviousness, and ease of not having to look for something is all front and centre with ensuring success with user experience. For developers, good API design also incorporates this quality. Furthermore, good API design allows developers to integrate their applications with third party systems in a decoupled manner; the third party systems are able to reuse the resources exposed by your API in previously unimagined ways. Lastly, good APIs are stable and adhere the ‘principle of least surprise’: third party developers are able to rely on your API to behave in a predictable manner.

Goodlife Health Clubs is well along the journey of digital transformation, but as we travel along this journey, we are seeing the need and the benefit of integration; the benefit of buy versus build; and the need to have open visibility and standards of our APIs. We have opted to have all of our APIs securely documented within POSTMAN which will allow us to;

• easily construct requests quickly;
• build workflows using collections;
• create integration testing suites which will allow us to bring partners into the cloud storage to securely test;
• integrate with our build systems;
• provide up to date documentation to our internal teams and partners with descriptions in markdown;
• host the documentation within Cloud share which will allow us to share with our third party integrators

POSTMAN is particularly important for us at Goodlife as we work with a number of partners - it becomes a secure and easy collaboration point for us to ensure up to date information is pertained against the API record. If things change within the API - it is easy communicated to everyone. It is also equally important that it allows the entire team (development, QA, and operations) to work together on APIs, better and faster. We can collaborate in real-time over our shared APIs by making sure everyone is always on the same page.

Key principles

Some key principles when it comes to API design and development:

• reduce barriers to entry: people won’t use stuff that’s too hard to use
• value simplicity over complexity
• API should be REST based with Standard OAuth or API token connection.
• paginated records for data pulled via API.
• both Export & Query options should be available.
• let systems naturally evolve rather than trying to mandate how they are used
• testing (using sample data) and error handling should be available.
• documentation and ability to make mock calls/responses to the API. A good example would be POSTMAN
• use widely adopted and open standards: this maximises participation and minimises vendor lock-in.
• make the API consistent with front-end reporting/metrics (including # of users), with both pre-aggregated and raw data options.
• make flattened raw data available.
• format column names for end-users
• make clear data definitions.

The (digital) world is changing rapidly - don't get Uber'd

A few key observations over the past 12-18 months;

API management is emerging as a key enabler to digital transformation

Time and budget constraints is driving a shift to hybrid integration middleware paradigms

The key to digital transformation efforts is a partnership between IT and the business. Companies can embrace this partnership by leveraging APIs to deliver reusable assets and improve the way they operate and scale. Until a company is ready to effectively change its operating model to fit into this new cultural movement fuelled by data and APIs, it truly isn't ready to digitally transform.