Defining value in the age of Platforms and APIs

A bias for innovation is not optional

There’s no company on earth that does not strive to develop software and services faster, innovate more. Often there are external factors as well that demand a change of course, sometimes spanning across a wide part of your existing IT portfolio. Just think of GDPR. Whatever pain or gain it is you may pursuit, the answer will certainly involve orchestration, automation and re-use. That is exactly where APIs come into the picture. As such, APIs are of course tooling and not means to an end. Nevertheless, they are a building block of any (Digital) Transformation story worth telling.

Speaking of which. The typical drivers for transformation are summarized in the picture below, courtesy of endjin.

Typically, any organization in a transformation state (which is like any organization except the ones doomed) would be on one of these three transformation states as follow.

• Digitization: Accessibility, Information and Data are name of the game at this state. There are blanks that need filling all over the place.
• Digitalization: Automation and API powered solutions are high on the agenda, often including “intelligent devices”, “AI” and the like. Efficiency gains and cost reduction are usually high up the agenda.
• Digital Transformation: Digital Products and Digital Business are seriously considered as viable alternatives or add-ons to products sold. “API Projects” as such do not exist anymore, instead ever-maintained and improved API Products.

Independent of which state applies to your organization: APIs and in particular open APIs, are crucial for paving the way to the next state. Further, platforms and APIs go hand in hand. I will write more about platform economy later – at this point it’s safe to say that APIs are in the middle of any versatile software components built for integration and device agnostic consumption.

APIs are omnipresent

The Oxford Dictionary says about APIs, quote: "A set of functions and procedures allowing the creation of applications that access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other service. (...) Early 21st century: abbreviation of application programming interface." Now, the most amazing take-away for me is that APIs already made it into the mainstream. No tech forums. No developer blogs. We are talking about Oxford Dictionary here.

Needless to say, that Oxford Dictionary comes with their own set of APIs, too.

What the first couple of lines of this paragraph from the first line to this line should tell you about the sentiment of this article, according to AWS Comprehend, is as follow.

{ "Sentiment": { "Sentiment": "NEUTRAL", "SentimentScore": { "Positive": 0.01853753998875618, "Negative": 0.0028220906388014555, "Neutral": 0.9766064286231995, "Mixed": 0.0020338245667517185 } } }

OK, so far this article has been rather neutral. Fair enough.

And that marks yet another typical trait of well-done APIs: they hide incredible complexity and amazing capabilities behind a well-defined facade easy to digest even for the most hobbyist of programmers. APIs power the democratisation of AI, as to be demonstrated.

In the next part of the series on Defining value in the age of Platforms and APIs, I'll write about projects vs products and getting to the core with Outside-In assertions.

Click here to go to part 2.