The platform business model is key in bringing together the power of the community, internal or external, to sustain and grow a business – and the ability to expose key assets to either internal or external stakeholders as APIs is the core building block in this digital movement. Sustainable and API driven agile business platforms enable different types of stakeholders to participate in the business – be it internal innovation by different business units creating new applications using legacy services or participatory business by a partner who builds and sells an app using a telco’s underlying services. Technology assets are a bulk of a company’s intellectual property and have to be built for sustainable reuse – the best way to do this is via API driven platforms. APIs then become the encapsulation of a company’s intellectual property and the agile platform sets up an environment to rapidly innovate on top of it.
It is clear that any organisation going digital needs to have a vision for an API driven agile business platform that encompasses all aspects of the life cycle. Often though organisations make the mistake of getting to the end state of selecting an API Management solution without looking at what the API Strategy is for the organisation and how that ties into the organisation’s business vision. This can either lead to a failed strategy, a failure to keep up with market demands or an un-sustainable business platform where agility is replaced by centers of excellence acting as monoliths and distributed teams is sacrificed for governance. Sustainable API driven business platforms that empower internal teams follow a few key drivers such as agility, distributed teams, a micro-technology approach, distributed governance or monitoring, security first design, continuous delivery and a strong business to technology vision.
In this talk we look at some of the key drivers in achieving sustainability and common pitfalls from the trenches. We look at how to utilise the power of platforms whilst enabling end to end agility.