(4) Erik Wilde (@dret) [http://twitter.com/dret]

(5) Axway [https://www.axway.com/] Catalysts [https://catalysts.axway.com/]

• Small team of experts in the digital transformation and API space
  • Help customers to make good decisions on their API journey
  • Move the community of API practitioners and their practices forward
• Team members are distributed globally
  • Uli Hitzel: @u1i [http://twitter.com/u1i]
  • Eric Horesnyi: @EricHoresnyi [http://twitter.com/EricHoresnyi]
  • Kay Lummitsch: @lummitsch [http://twitter.com/lummitsch]
  • Emmanuel Methivier: @e_methivier [http://twitter.com/e_methivier]
  • Brian Otten: @bottencatalyst [http://twitter.com/bottencatalyst]
  • Brian Pagano: @brianpagano [http://twitter.com/brianpagano]
  • Erik Wilde: @dret [http://twitter.com/dret]

(7) Jeff Bezos' Services Rant: The Rules [https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611]

• Famous small set of SOA design rules
  • Teams must expose functionality through services
  • Communication happens only through service interfaces
  • There are no hard guidelines for service design
  • Internal/external service is a matter of policy, not one of design
• Going against the let's pick a platform spirit of old-school SOA

(8) Jeff Bezos' Services Rant: The Consequences [https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611]

• With more freedom comes more responsibility
  • Monitoring and metrics are necessary for finding root causes
  • All APIs must be hardened against DoS attacks
  • Automated QA is necessary to really understand service health
  • Services must be documented and registered so that they can be discovered
  • Debugging becomes harder because of service dependencies
• Sophisticated tooling required to manage the new SOA landscape
• Much easier in today's technology landscape than in 2002

(9) API First [https://www.apiscene.io/product/api-first-the-essence-of-digital-transformation/]: Everything is an API

• Jeff Bezos' Mandate [Jeff Bezos' Services Rant: The Rules [https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611] (1)] focuses on API products
  • Loose coupling means to look at products as APIs
  • All dependencies have to be designed and built as APIs
• API products are built by thinking about interactions
  1. The API is the first UI
  2. APIs are designed before anything is implemented
  3. APIs are the primary means of team communications

(11) Aligning Business and IT

(12) Key Factors for Success

(13) Transaction Costs Define Business

A firm is likely therefore to emerge in those cases where a very short term contract would be unsatisfactory. It is obviously of more importance in the case of services than it is in the case of the buying of commodities.
We may sum up this section of the argument by saying that the operation of a market costs something and by forming an organisation and allowing some authority (an entrepreneur) to direct the resources, certain marketing costs are saved. The entrepreneur has to carry out his function at less cost, taking into account the fact that he may get factors of production at a lower price than the market transactions which he supersedes, because it is always possible to revert to the open market if he fails to do this.

R. H. Coase, The Nature of the Firm, Economica 4(16):386-405, November 1937 [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x]

(14) Nature of the API

Anything that has measurable impact on transaction costs (both externally and internally) will have measurable impact on business structure and economics. To maximize benefits, it is necessary that both external and internal business structure and transactions are addressed.
APIs can lead to measurable impact on transaction costs because they decrease coupling between peers, in particular in the case of services. By identifying all transaction interfaces and transforming them to APIs, firms achieve more flexibility to define and change their value chains, making them more adaptable and hence more robust. This API transformation should cover external and internal transactions.

(16) Internal and External API Usage

(17) APIs as External Interfaces

• Direct API monetization
• API foundation for user journeys (omni-channel)
• Value chain optimization (outsourced APIs)

(18) APIs as Internal Componentization

• Moving from integration to interconnection (IT modernization)
• Decoupling products and their development cycles and speed
• Improving capability reuse across the whole organization

(20) Business Pillar

• Increase delivery speed of capabilities and products
• Decrease cost of product development and adaptation
• Improve insight into products and value chains
• Aligning/unifying business and IT: Business, rewritten by software™

(21) Organizational Pillar

• Increased team autonomy increases team delivery speed
• Structures across teams build communities of practice
• API support and platform provided by Center for Enablement (C4E)
• Team practices inform and form the API guidelines

Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. [http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html] (Mel Conway [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Conway])

(22) Technology Pillar

• Constrain what products have to do (not how)
• No hidden channels bypassing the API strategy
• API guidelines for protocols, patterns, and practices
• Lifecycle for technology maturity and support

(23) Got Strategy?

• There is no one-size-fits-all API Strategy
• Strategy always depends on context
  • What do you want to improve/achieve with APIs?
  • What does your organization look like?
  • What is the main value that you produce?
  • What does the market look like?
  • What do your customers look like?
  • What does your competition look like?

(24) API Strategy = Pillars × Perspectives

(26) Bigger Than Tech

• API strategy is more than just technology
• Strategy defines what to do: API value chains
• Program defines how to do it: Assess/enable/coach API practice

(27) Thank You!

• Slides online: dret.net/lectures/webinar-2020/strategy [http://dret.net/lectures/webinar-2020/strategy]
• More information:
  • Twitter: @dret [http://twitter.com/dret]
  • YouTube: youtube.com/ErikWilde [https://www.youtube.com/ErikWilde]
  • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/netdret [http://www.linkedin.com/in/netdret]
  • Web: dret.net/netdret/ [http://dret.net/netdret/]