I have been looking to develop analogies for APIs that will make more sense to business folks. I’ve settled in on using what people already understand, the supply chain. But, instead of the raw physical materials and labor that goes into physical products, I am talking about the digital raw resources your business depends on available in your internal data, content, and algorithms, as well as those acquired from 3rd-party producers. My intent with this analogy is to bring more visibility to the important raw resources that already exist across the enterprise, and get API contracts in place to help you better manage these resources.
If you are further along in your API journey, you likely have an API catalog available for the APIs you make available to 3rd party developers, but it is unlikely that you have orderly warehouses of all your raw digital resources and capabilities mined from your databases and other internal systems. It is also unlikely that you have orderly warehouses for the 3rd-party digital resources and capabilities you depend on for your business. The naming, tagging, and other metadata for your APIs is how you inventory these warehouses of raw API resources and capabilities, and Git repositories are how you assemble your warehouses, and make them available for use in other APIs, applications, and integrations. API contracts make sure you have your digital warehouses properly inventoried and discoverable, carefully keeping track of what you have, where it exists, and how much you have.
APIs are how you access data, content, and algorithms inside and outside the enterprise. These digital resources and capabilities are your raw materials, and the refined resources and products you need from your suppliers. API contracts are how you keep track of these relationships and inventories to make sure you have control over your supply chain. Make sure that you have a proper accounting of your internal digital resources, as well as what you depend on from suppliers, using APIs to define and automate what you need in desktop, web, mobile, and artificial intelligence applications. The collective value of your API contracts represents what you are capable of as a business, and is what will shape your business for years to come. Let me know how I can help you better manage your digital supply chain, and bring more order to how you deliver the applications and integrations that power your business.
API contracts are the receipts for not just the resources and capabilities you depend on, but also the assurances that you can trust the quality, performance, and reliability of those digital resources and capabilities over time. In aggregate, the API contracts you have for your internal APIs, as well as those of 3rd-party APIs you consume will define the state of your enterprise. These API contracts define what you are capable of doing, how fast you can deliver, the quality of your business, and how competitive you are in your industry. You would never run a physical business without contracts in place for your supply chain, and there is no reason why you should be running a digital business without contracts in place for your digital supply chain. Let me help you inventory your existing digital resources, what you produce natively as part of your enterprise operations, but also what you depend on from suppliers, ensuring you have an accurate understanding of your supply chain, represented as machine-readable contracts you can use to optimize, automate, and scale your supply chain of tomorrow.
