Application Integration

Questions To Ask Your Organization When It Comes To API Discovery

| Kin Lane |

We work with a lot of organizations to develop, strengthen, and realize their API strategy. Depending on the relationship, and before we engage too deeply, we tend to ask our new customers a few questions, starting with a handful about API discovery. This helps us better understand where an organization is in their API journey, and develop an honest view of how strong of a handle an organization has on their API-driven capabilities.

Here are five questions we use to help us get to the bottom of where an enterprise organization is when it comes to having a handle on their digital resources:

  1. Do you know where all of your APIs are?
  2. Do you have an actively used catalog of APIs?
  3. Do you use the OpenAPI (fka Swagger) specification to define your APIs?
  4. Do you have Postman Collections available for your APIs?
  5. Do you use JSON Schema to articulate the underlying data structure for APIs?

While the answers to these questions are telling, a lack of answers, depending on who we are talking to, also reveals a lot. The state of API discovery at an organization reveals a lot about where they are in their API journey and is often revealing about the company culture. API discovery is not just about finding APIs, it is about organizations knowing where their digital assets are, and how agile and flexible they are when it comes to putting them to work. It also reveals a lot about the overall security culture that exists at a company, because in the end, you can’t secure what you don’t know about.

These five questions are just the beginning of a wider survey we conduct when 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.

API Discovery