APIs and information generated through APIs can help your business navigate in the digital landscape and aid you in making well informed business decisions – So let’s analyze APIs!
It has now been a while since we introduced the API Ready Model to the wider community of Scandinavian organisations and we have been through close to 15 API initiatives with different scenarios, approaches and objectives. It has been an awarding journey, both in terms of the results we have generated with our customers, but also in terms of insights and knowledge gathered along the way. One of the insights we have made is the need to add an additional step in the API Ready Model – Analyze. Which is why we have decided to update the API Ready Model with an Analysis phase. So let’s elaborate …
In the era of Digital Transformation, organisations are almost swamped by initiatives in different directions. These are often driven by the business side, who is on one side looking to defend themselves against more or less innovate digital initiatives from competitors, and on the other side try to innovate digital services of their own or just try to keep up with customers demands for digital services.
But what if information generated through APIs could be used to assist you to make well informed business decisions and priorities based on facts rather than feelings?
Through our work with the API Ready Model we have learnt that analyzing behaviours, keeping track of information and making predictions or forecasts have become an increasingly important part of several organisations work with APIs and digitization. Data from APIs and API Management solutions can also be used to analyze and pinpoint various internal issues with system or architecture, that can be crucial to the long term success of you API initiative.
Next level Business Intelligence
Sure….you might say that Business Intelligence is nothing new and have been on most organisations agenda for several years. True….but what is in fact new is the data these solutions will have to analyze and present. With information flowing digitally/on line through APIs, a need to analyze data in real time has emerged. This is different from many BI tools of today, that are designed to analyze data and produce reports in arrears. BI tools can tell you what happened yesterday – APIs can tell you what is happening right now. Imagine your marketing department launching an on line campaign and being able to instantly monitor the outcome of the campaign in real time, versus reading about the impact in tomorrows BI report. With the Digital Transformation, decision making will have to be made in real time and information to support decisions will consequently also have to be made available in real time.
There are already several tools available to do this on the market. Both Open Source based and proprietary. Trough our work with the API Ready model we have came across and done implementations for many of them. These include Kibana, Logstash, Azure Stream Analytics, WSO2 Data Analytics Server (DAS) and others. Several traditional Business Intelligence tools can probably also be configured or adapted to meet these requirements. To make it easy for you to choose your preferred tooling, we have developed a plug in to stream data that is generated from APIs published using the WSO2 API Manager. This means that when you implement an APIM based on WSO2 technology using our API Ready model, we can make sure to share data generated by the API usage for you to analyze and use in real time in a tool of your choice.
All this have made us realize that there is a need to add an additional step in the API Ready Model. We have decided to call this step ”Analyze”. For sure some of the topics covered above could potentially be made a part of an extended ”Monitoring” phase, but based on our experience and ongoing discussions with customers, we feel that this is such an important topic in an API initiative that it should be made a separate phase. This is why we have added the ”Analyze” phase in our updated version of the Redpill Linpro API Ready Model.
Looking forward to connecting with you on your API initiative!
