Getting enterprise leadership to care about APIs is the top challenge in the API universe. Everybody benefits with executive leadership mandates the prioritization of APIs, and invests in all stages of the API lifecycle. While I have spent an enormous amount of brain power on this subject over the years, I feel like it has primarily been from a vendor perspective, which always has the goal of convincing leadership to buy, not necessarily care or understand. I am looking to develop an ongoing series of stories, policies, and guidance that focus on helping business leadership actually care and develop an awareness of APIs, admitting that I have a lot of work ahead of me to properly dovetail my messaging with how leadership in different industries truly sees the world.
To help ground and guide my API strategy and policy work I am going to give myself a limit of 8 working concepts I use to help connect business leadership at the strategy and policy level, which are grouped into 4 separate buckets, with the first bucket simply being about money.
- Generating Revenue
- Saving Money
Next I want to speak to the pain, and provide solutions that speak to dreams of efficiency, helping leadership understand how their API strategy and the policies they implement can have a real-world impact on efficiency as well as sensible automation, connecting the API dots for them here.
- Operational Efficiency
- Automating Operations
I understand that business leadership is going to have specific customers in mind when they are looking to invest across operations, and I am keen on demonstrating how the right strategy and policies can help business leadership not only land new customers, but help ensure they are sticky.
- Landing New Customers
- Keeping Customers Buying
Lastly, I think I’ll court the pride and ego departments when it comes to business leadership and appeal to their desires to appear to be a modern tech company, demonstrating that they have been successful in their API journey, and have full control over their digital API supply chain, factories, and distribution.
- Looking Like a Modern Company
- Being Considered a Tech Company
I have other ideas I want to explore, and I am sure these will evolve, but I am going to start here. Unlike previous times in my career I won’t be linking these to a specific service or tool. There will be some of that as part of my partner network, but the primary linkage is going to be to actual policies with real-world guidance and rules that help you educate, automate, and yes enforce change across the enterprise that will contribute to each area outlined above.
I am confident that I can make API Evangelist Contracts speak to what business stakeholders are needing when it comes to API operations. I am also very interested in mapping what they want to specific policies, rules, schema, lifecycle, and guidance being applied to API contracts, so that I can roll-up the state of the API landscape and provide a strategic and policy snapshot to leadership—keeping them in the loop, developing awareness, and hopefully contributing back to shape API strategy and policies.
