How API management can help your business survive a pandemic

When people ask what I work with, I usually say that I work as a IT-specialist. More often than not, I get questions on what that exactly means - Do you work as a software developer? I then go on to explain that I work with API management and Identity and access management. While many, unsurprisingly, outside the IT-domain are unfamiliar with these concepts, most people within the IT-domain seems only to have a vague idea of what I'm referring to.

In this article I will try to convey the importance of this (API management) concept and the reasons why your business should pay attention to it.

What is an API?

APIs have been around for decades and are the core building blocks of almost every modern software system. But something that revolutionized web development was the introduction of web services and the rise of REST APIs. A simple search in a Google search bar yields thousands of results that contain dozens of API- endpoints from hundreds of different sites. In essence, web services and APIs are simply the collection of methods or properties for performing specific tasks, such as posting an article on a website or retrieving data from a database. These resources often allow applications to do things like interact with the outside world, perform certain computations, read data from a database or file system, display data on a web page, and so on. The term REST means "Representational State Transfer", in other words these resources, when accessed on a client, represent some particular state of the application that's known as the resource or state of the system at a given point in time, thus being "stateless" (unlike SOAP web-services that expose their own methods).

APIs at the core of business transformation

When you think about the key challenges facing organisations today, the first obvious one is managing the growth of data that is accumulated from all the disparate sources that exist in the business. As organisations scale their IT-systems and spend more and more time handling and processing this data, they are also faced with the challenge of how to extract value from it. The most obvious solution to this problem is the use of data analytics, where organisations attempt to discover patterns in data which enable them to improve and monetise their current or potential business models. For instance, if you use a social network like Facebook, your business model depends on the information you collect from your customers. If you use that data to understand the habits of your customers, you can better tailor your product and marketing to their needs.

However, at a time when businesses are continually searching for more efficient ways to deliver services, these patterns are becoming increasingly difficult to identify and classify. One way of solving this problem is through the use of APIs or "APIs as services", where organisations develop and implement APIs on top of their existing systems and infrastructure to provide end users with access to data and data- driven insights that are otherwise difficult or expensive to obtain through traditional methods. Companies like Airbnb and Uber are using APIs to automate their operations, which allows them to more efficiently deliver value to their customers, while keeping the costs of providing their services low. Using APIs, organisations gain valuable access to data, which they can utilise to create smarter business decisions and offer services more efficiently. Another reason for companies to be adopting this type of technology is for the increase in the number of applications which make use of large amounts of data, which often need to be analysed and visualised, or to make accurate inferences from that data, rather than relying on a single user's own intuition.

How do we do it?

Now that we know how APIs can potentially improve business outcomes, let 's look at a few ways of using APIs to improve our knowledge, and then explore how we can take this further in creating data-driven decisions and business opportunities with our customers. Then, we 'll introduce a series of APIs to demonstrate this new information management system we 're building. Understanding how this system would affect the business results is crucial in determining whether or not we can achieve our goals, so that our customers can receive an enhanced, value added service and improve overall business outcomes, which includes:

• Increasing the amount of information we can gather from our customers
• Creating and improving a better understanding of business decisions, allowing us to optimise services and reduce the cost of providing those services
• Increasing productivity, increasing profitability and customer engagement through improved sales and marketing
• Providing a higher level of business intelligence so we know when to push boundaries and when to defer.

If we apply these principles to the business we are building as opposed to a piece of software we've built, we can quickly see how APIs allow us to gain more value and provide a more informed opinion, rather than a "one-size fits all" approach, which is generally frowned upon as being "bad for customers", and potentially even for business growth (you 're not going to win the battle of the marketplace using only a single tool, will you?).

Is it that easy?

Lets say you have a fairly large customer base that you want to grow to the next level. There's a multitude of factors to consider as to what that growth path looks like and you are at this phase of your own growth cycle and your current team is a fraction of the size you would like to have. However there may be ways in which you can increase your customer base with a minimum of additional effort and potentially improve both your quality and the value proposition to your customer base. What do I mean by that? I mean the number of potential customers in your database can only represent so much and you may need to consider how your process is using that data and the assumptions you made. That could include a different version of a service or a slightly modified approach, as well as even adding new features. But in my opinion, the bigger issue is that even if you were to build your entire customer base up from scratch using all possible inputs and models, they may never come to buy your product (and in fact, if they did , they may end up not being happy with the results). Using APIs for data sharing and querying allows for some significant flexibility, and you may want to consider doing some initial development of the solution using the APIs in your application stack (for this reason , I strongly recommend using one of the great open source solutions out there).

A real life scenario

What does that really look like? Let me give you an example. The client is an advertising agency and needs to send its product ads to their email subscribers. In the past they've typically created these ads manually by crawling the Internet, downloading a few webpages and then creating the various pieces of content to get their message across. This time however, instead of a lot of manual work, they decided to use REST APIs, and the good thing is that REST APIs are very easy to use and you can use them to build any type of solution. You can use these APIs to do almost anything with the ads as long as you can connect to and access them. The advertiser has just set the number of times an ad will run to a couple of parameters in order to start sending these ads to the email subscribers. Using the API you can retrieve, create and modify each of the ad tags in a real -time manner by creating new ones and then inserting or updating ones that match the parameters. Once the ads are finished, you get the data back and all is well. Now imagine that the advertiser is creating more and more ads to drive awareness to their products and also want to see how much their emails go over to people 's email boxes, how effective each advertisement has been and how many have clicked on those. Well you can just create a new API call for each of these scenarios that has multiple parameters that allow you to control the behavior of the new ads created.

What is the catch?

While the benefits of APIs should be obvious at this point - there are certainly disadvantages to them. While APIs offer significant benefits, they also hold certain drawbacks, such as security concerns and even risk of privacy violations (if not adequately covered). Moreover, while many APIs have been developed to perform specific tasks and are well documented, many still lack good documentation or are only partially documented. An important aspect of an API is its documentation. Documentation is the process of providing users with information that will make it easy for them to understand and utilize the API. The more useful the information provided, the higher the value of the API and the easier it will become to integrate with and benefit from.

I am a 40 year old Systems analyst and I work as a Technical manager at the County council of ?sterg?tland (Sweden). I am a big proponent of REST APIs for business services and a huge advocate of the open source architecture. What are your thoughts on API management? Are APIs the secret sauce of great software or just an addition of layers of abstraction? Do they add value to our daily experience or add unnecessary complexity? Leave a comment or PM me, I would love to hear your opinion!