“What are businesses doing with APIs and why are they doing it?” As I meet with clients interested in formulating an API strategy, this is always a topic I discuss. Every business and IT executive wants to understand the API business drivers IBM is seeing around the world in their industry and others. While they have their own reasons for interest in APIs, they want to be sure that they understand all the possibilities. Following the business driver discussion, we discuss how to identify API use cases specifically for their business.
I have already published a series of blogs on “
use cases for every industry”. And I am not planning to simply repeat this. These blogs provide examples of use cases across a range of topic areas and across the entire industry for each industry as the title implies. However, industries often cover a wide range of individual businesses and many companies that I meet play a particular role in the industry and do not necessarily span the entire breadth of the industry. So, while some use cases may be applicable to their business, others may not. These blogs are valuable in providing samples, but they don’t tell you how to identify specifically what APIs your business should choose to implement.
My plan (which I will roll out over the next few months) is to write a series of blogs covering 4 business drivers that I see repeated frequently across geographies and industries and also cover the API identification methodology that I apply to 7 categories of API use cases.
The four business drivers I plan to discuss are:
- Speed – enabling the business to execute faster
- Reach – reaching new customers and new markets
- Innovation – implementing new business models, disrupting markets
- Domains – managing interactions within the company across geographies and lines of business
Earlier this year Forrester published a study “
The Total Economic Impact™ of an API Management Solution” which discussed the ROI obtained by a set of IBM API Connect customers from their API initiatives. In the study Forrester evaluates the benefits across six use case areas. I have added a seventh (IoT) to their list and will publish blogs covering the API identification methodology associated with each of these seven use case areas:
For each use case area I will discuss the questions to ask yourself and what to consider to help identify useful API candidates in that area.
As I write each of the blogs I will come back to this blog and update the lists above with links to the detailed blogs. You can use this blog as a table of contents to reach all of the other material. I hope that you will find this useful! First one up next week is the business driver –
Speed.
To understand more about IBM’s thoughts on the API Economy visit the IBM
API Economy website. IBM API Connect is IBM’s complete foundation to Create, Run, Manage, and Secure APIs. You can find more information about IBM API Connect at the
API Connect website. And you can also experience a
trial version of API Connect.
If you have questions, please let me know. Connect with me through comments here or via twitter
@Arglick to continue the discussion.
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