Where Is Your Organization At In Its API Journey?

When we engage with a new customer, we always work to understand how far along their organization is in their overall API journey. This gives us a better understanding of how long an organization has been working on their API strategy, delivering, and iterating upon their approach to defining their capabilities as simple, web-based APIs. Depending on how far along an organization is in their overall API journey, they will be ready for different levels of engagement, and those further along in their journey tend to be more ready for some of the event-driven solutions Streamdata.io brings to the table.

We don’t judge the organizations we engage with regarding how far along they are, we just need to have a full understanding of where they are in their journey. Helping us better understand how we can truly help an organization along in their effort. Whether or not it is about getting started, being more organized in their approach, augmenting with event-driven infrastructure, or even beginning to get more structured around governance. If we go into an organization talking about event-driven infrastructure, when a group is still trying to discover where all of their API resources, we can significantly complicate things, making everything worse and not actually helping anyone out at all.

This is why we like better understand where organizations are in their journey before we get to work understanding where we can help out. Working to paint a more honest picture of how far along an organization is when it comes to not just doing APIs, but also doing them well across each stop along the API lifecycle, ranging from design to depreciation. To help us map out how far along an organization is in their journey we have been developing a basic questionnaire that helps flesh out the awareness that exists when it comes to doing APIs across an organization. Getting to the bottom of what an organization really needs when it comes to being helped along in their API program.

The question, “where are you in your API journey”, is very revealing all by itself. How an organization responds when asked will reveal a lot about how far along a group is in their API journey. If they are just getting started, they might not even understand the question, unaware that doing APIs are a journey at all. The further along an organization is, the more nuanced and self-aware their response to the question will be. Responding in various honest, or some not very honest ways about how things are going when it comes to doing APIs. Making this the first question we ask any organization we are engaging with when it comes to helping them develop their own API strategy, and become more effective in delivering APIs across the enterprise.