Isn’t it strange that we are regularly talking about the need to get business stakeholders more involved in doing APIs? Like us engineers producing and consuming APIs operate in some liminal space outside the business of APIs. I work with Claire Barrett of APIsFirst on a weekly basis and she is always quick to point out that there is no separation between business and engineering when it comes to doing APIs, we are actually all in this together-—there is not “outside the business”.
There are numerous realities of out API operations that we tend to be in denial about, but the legacy of our estrangement from business operations via historic information technology (IT) narratives is one of the most damaging. Producing APIs cost money. Sustaining APIs cost money. APIs directly and indirectly generate value for the enterprise. Consuming our own APIs, but also 3rd party APIs is how we operate our businesses. Why do we perpetually see them as separate?
There are numerous efforts to address this separation, from our API management solutions focusing on API products to the cultivation and evolution of API product managers. While there are numerous aspects of API productionization that speak to this schism in the enterprise, they feel like outside-in vendor notions of what is needed. They also feel very techno-centric, where I think we gotta get at more of the reasons why IT is still such a separate beast in your average enterprise–which is a people thing.
