It is Monday morning, and you are ready to get to work–do you know where all the digital resources and capabilities you need are from across the enterprise, as well as the ones outside the enterprise that exist behind all of the applications your business uses? Can you search for your API resources, and try them out? Can you easily integrate and automate with these APIs across the different on-premise or cloud applications you use each day? Having an accurate inventory of your internal, external, and 3rd-party APIs will undoubtedly shape how successful you are in your work this week, no matter what business sector you operate in.
HTTP APIs have been evolving for almost 25 years now, and according to Akamai, 83% of the traffic on the Web is driven by APIs. There is no reason in 2024 that you shouldn’t know where all of your HTTP APIs are, and you should have a full accounting of your digital resources and capabilities in any given moment. Whether it is web applications, mobile applications, or artificial intelligence, you will need access to your API resources and capabilities to do business this week. The APIs your company produces, as well as the 3rd party APIs you consume—-you need all of these digital resources and capabilities at your fingertips, ready to be applied as part of the AI and automation that will keep your company moving forward to lead in your industry.
An API catalog for your public APIs is a good place to start with inventorying your APIs, but you should also have an accounting of your internal APIs, otherwise you’ll end up with a lot of redundant sprawl and unnecessary dependencies across your business operations. You also need a thorough accounting of all the 3rd party APIs you depend on, as well as the APIs behind the infrastructure and applications you already depend on. APIs aren’t just about publicly making your digital resources and capabilities available to 3rd party developers, it is about having an accounting of all the APIs you produce and consume.
It is Monday morning and you are already at a disadvantage because you don’t know where all your APIs are. What you build this week won’t always be leveraging the latest resources and capabilities your business has access to, and you are more than likely reinventing the wheel, doing redundant work that could be better spent on whatever your core business value is. Can you imagine if you had access to all of the internal, first-party, and third-party APIs you produce? Can you imagine if you had access to all of the external 3rd parties you already use, and are available behind the infrastructure, services, and tooling you already pay for? It is likely that your competitor does. Make sure you are properly inventorying your most critical business asset today—-HTTP APIs.
Let me know how I can help you properly inventory your enterprise digital resources—-let’s get started mapping the API and team landscape, and identify where the greatest challenges are.
