Who the API Evangelist Speaks With About Being an API Change Agent Within the Enterprise
This post is a summary digest of enterprise API leadership that API Evangelist has been speaking with, but also will be targeting with a new API Evangelist suite of knowledge base products that are currently under development. We have taken conversations with enterprise organizations primarily over the last five years and distilled down all of the questions, desires, and dreams of people we have talked with into the following outline.
There are many people involved with API change within the enterprise, but there is a classic persona of who knocks on the API Evangelist door or is recommended by someone who is familiar with what API Evangelist does and brings them to our door to have a conversation about property governing their enterprise API operations.
These individuals are often new to a company and looking to make change, or they have been there a long time and have hit the wall when it comes to taming the digital transformation and API chaos that exists across API operations, looking to do something about it, but doesn’t always know where they should begin.
The current state of technology within these enterprises is almost always the same, with well-meaning and smart people working hard over the years to deliver what is needed within any given moment, but have also picked their head up to realize that this work isn’t sustainable, and needs help getting back on track.
Most individuals will walk in the door and want to emphasize that their organization is unique, has their own way of approaching things, and will need the most custom approach available, when in reality 80% of what is happening is the same struggles that other enterprises face, they just haven’t been exposed to it.
Almost everyone involved with APIs in the enterprise is focused exclusively on the direct monetization of API resources, with very few actually doing anything to standardize this work across all internal and external APIs, and always lack a balanced understanding of what direct and indirect API value generation means.
All API consumption should be measured and invoiced upon even if a payment is ever received. There is a growing enterprise appetite for justifying the return on API investment over the last decade, but few have been actively metering, invoking, and reporting to understand what is, let alone what will be or mean.
Despite the prevailing narrative of API reuse that exists across different types of applications, many organizations opted to choose new protocols and patterns to deliver what they need, and are still facing reusability and redundancy issues, but now with more APIs and more API protocols in the mix to deal with.
REST chased web and mobile, GraphQL promised to solve it all, and event-driven has created more sprawl, without incentivizing much reuse. Artificial Intelligence is now showing us how we have failed to reuse and eliminate redundancy, while once again expanding the surface area of our enterprise tech debt.
Despite the promise of connectivity and interoperability, technology and APIs have tended to separate us into ideological camps of business and engineering, by programming language, and any other tribal boundary you find in today’s enterprise, leaving a fairly sad state of knowledge and expertise being shared.
Business, human, and technological nutrients are what gets passed around when communities arise around the production and consumption of APIs. APIs require the humans to discover, connect, and leave a trail of knowledge for those who come after, and without it, the enterprise can be left in a pretty bad state of non-collaboration.
The state of teams producing and consuming APIs across the enterprise is almost always fragmented, competitive, and political, and when this is the foundation for producing external APIs that power a company’s applications, is given to partners, or made available via public portal, it can become a problem.
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The presence or lack of presence for the public API portal of any enterprise is a reflection of the internal people who are doing the work to produce and support HTTP APIs, and ensuring that teams have the skills and resources they need to be successful will require significant time and investment over many years.
Your average enterprise organization has a sprawling and chaotic mix of application programming interfaces being produced and consumed, making business operations difficult to see, understand, and confidently move in any single direction, and always working to play catch up when it comes to technical debt.
It is always interesting to hear API teams share with me how resource deficient they are when they have so many digital resources surrounding them, revealing just how much help your average enterprise needs when it comes to API education, collaboration, and observability, so they can better use what they already have.
The enterprise leadership API Evangelist has been talking to is not asking a lot, they are just looking for some quick ways they can achieve, or at least get closer to a more desired technical state of API operations, giving teams the autonomy and accountability they need, while still steering the ship in the right direction.
Everything listed here must be delivered alongside everything else already happening within the enterprise, providing an operational “overlay” for APIs to be rolled out without disrupting existing operations, forcing teams to take on additional work, and will require a centralized, but embedded team to deliver on.
Enterprise API operations have to be sustainable and pay its way, and API Evangelist has always heard questions around how APIs can pay for themselves, but the bar is getting higher when it comes to there being a solid business strategy, dashboard, and reporting to dial-in the business of enterprise API operations.
This is not exclusive to public facing APIs, and the business strategy, dashboard, and reporting applies to internal, partner, as well as the shadow APIs that exist behind the desktop, web, mobile, and device applications in use across the enterprise, governing every API in production through a business lens.?
Few in the enterprise care about APIs, but everyone cares about the experience of running the enterprise and its applications and integrations via a sub-optimal API experience, and enterprise leadership has some pretty clear desires when it comes to improving the human experience that happens across API operations.
The human experience of discovering, accessing, onboarding with APIs, and ensuring they are trustworthy, reliable, and affordable to produce and consume is top of mind for enterprise leadership, and it is something that is impacting every aspect of the enterprise, setting the stage for the stone business outside the firewall.
People are the most costly, messy, and valuable asset an enterprise possesses, and enterprise leadership is extremely focused on keeping the talent they have and empowering them to do more work over time with API integrations and automation—raising the stakes for getting all the API people moving in the same direction.
80% of the work with APIs is people work, and successful API operations provide teams with the agency and autonomy they need to be successful, while investing in their skills and training, and creating a space where team’s work is evangelized and celebrated by default to keep the humans working together.
API Evangelist has been talking with enterprise API leadership since 2010, and in the last fifteen years, very little has changed, aside from a focus on APIs as a product evolving, API governance become top of mind, and maybe the concept of Microservices—all of this would reflect a conversation with enterprises in 2010. Granted, more companies are further along in their API journey, and there are many, many, many more APIs in production in 2025, but the conversation is basically the same. Errrr wrong, we were talking about APIs and Artificial Intelligence in 2012 (Wolfram Alpha, IBM Watson CHANGED EVERYTHING)—there was quite a hype phase for a bit, not like today, but there was one.?
The point of this post isn’t to shame folks, it is to acknowledge the work on the table for enterprises today. The choice really comes down to whether enterprises will continue to chase each wave of technological hype, or will invest in standardizing and stabilizing the existing foundation of their enterprise—HTTP APIs. API Evangelist is 100% focused on surveying and assessing the API landscape, and providing downloadable governance that enterprise can take back and apply centrally as part of platform and top-down governance efforts, or in a more tactical and federated way—just let us know where you need the most help.
Developer Advocate specializing in Full Text, Vector, and Hybrid Search
1 个月Interesting short snippets. Anywhere I can read more about the point - No Actively Managed Plan for API Access?
Sales and Customer Success at Treblle | API Solutions for the API-First World
1 个月As always, great insights! ??