Digital transformation: how to achieve a successful API project ?

How to offer value through its APIs?

API Management is a further step in SOA maturity, where we focus on the relationship between APIs and their consumers.

An API in itself is the emerged part of a Service in the SOA sense. The APIs offered by the company to its ecosystem (customers, partners, suppliers, government agencies, etc.) must be managed specifically if we want to derive value from them. Managing an API implies being able to manage and differentiate the quality of service and monitoring according to the users of this API. Such an API must be accessible and published. We talk about API store or developer portal where subscribers can easily discover and test the API offer.

This involves tracking the list of customers, including through a subscription mechanism, self-service or not, and securing calls to ensure the identities of consumers using published APIs.

API management is equipped with API Management solutions and requires a governance organization to ensure the monitoring and evaluation of APIs:

• Are the users of the API our initial targets?

• Does my API have a limited number of errors?

• Is demand increasing or decreasing?

The objective is to be able to bring value to the IS and to the business through the API offer. We go beyond the simple software project and this implies an evaluation by the business lines.

This step must correspond to a need to have a digital offer on which we must ensure access security control, limitation by quotas, or even monetization of access.

API management is the logical consequence of the openness of the IS, the building block of the extended company, the secret of an adapted and tailor-made response and finally a real-time company player.

How to approach this approach? A useful first step is to deepen your knowledge by reading the reference book “SOA the architect’s guide”, published by the reference publisher DUNOD. This book is here.