The scope of marketing, evangelism, and outreach around APIs, whether they are internal, with partners, or publicly available, is always a barometer of how far along an enterprise organization is in their API journey. How much infrastructure is up to support outreach, engagement, and support is a quick way to quantify the size, and often health of an API initiative within the enterprise. There are some basic signals to look for when it comes to sizing up the scope of outreach around your APIs operation, and we find these questions help us uncover most of the relevant signals:
– Is there a dedicated API advocate or evangelist on staff?
– Do you have a dedicated blog for your API program?
– Do you have an email address dedicated to supporting your APIs?
– Do you have a ticketing system dedicated to supporting your APIs?
– Do you have a newsletter available for your API program?
– Do you have a dedicated Twitter account for your API program?
– Do you have a dedicated GitHub organization for your API program?
– Does your team attend or speak at conferences about your API efforts?
Depending on the industry, and whether or not a group is managing public APIs, the answers to these questions will vary. However, we prefer to keep API outreach very centered on a public persona, because we feel that most enterprise organizations will ultimately have public APIs, and believe pretty strongly that all enterprise organizations should at least have a public API program, even if the APIs are actually kept private, and accessible to a smaller, more controlled group. Having a public API program just sets a realistic tone for how APIs that operate on the web should be done, emphasizing privacy and security out of the gate.
These questions help illustrate the scope of investment into any API program within the enterprise, and are just one component of a much wider survey we conduct as we are getting to know an enterprise organization in preparation for one of our Streamdata.io Journey workshops. If you are interested in seeing the full questionnaire, or learning more about our API workshops, feel free to connect. Streamdata.io is all about event-driven API infrastructure, but we are also about ensuring your enterprise organization is ready for event-driven API infrastructure, and sometimes that takes some investment in other areas along the API lifecycle, before you are ready.
