What Are Your Enterprise API Capabilities?

I spend a lot of time helping enterprise organizations discover their APIs. All of the organizations I talk to have trouble knowing where all of their APIs are — even the most organized of them. Development and IT groups have just been moving too fast over the last decade to know where all of their web services and APIs are. This results in large organizations not fully understanding what all of their capabilities are even if it is something they actively operate and may drive existing web or mobile applications.

Each individual API within the enterprise represents a single capability. The ability to accomplish a specific enterprise task that is valuable to the business. While each individual engineer might be aware of the capabilities present on their team, without group-wide and comprehensive API discovery across an organization, the extent of the enterprise capabilities is rarely known. If architects, business leadership, and any other stakeholder can’t browse, list, search, and quickly get access to all of the APIs that exist, the knowledge of the enterprise capabilities will not be able to be quantified or articulated as part of regular business operations.

In 2018, the capabilities of any individual API is articulated by its machine-readable definition. Most likely OpenAPI, but could also be something like API Blueprint, RAML, or other specification. For these definitions to speak to not just the technical capabilities of each individual API but also the business capabilities, they will have to be complete. Utilizing a higher level strategic set of tags that help label and organize each API into a meaningful set of business capabilities that best describes what each API delivers. Providing a sort of business capabilities taxonomy that can be applied to each API’s definition and used across the rest of the API lifecycle, but most importantly as part of API discovery, and the enterprise digital product catalog.

One of the first things I ask any enterprise organization I’m working with upon arriving, is “do you know where all of your APIs are?” The answer is always no. Many will have a web service or API catalog, but it almost always is out of date, and not used religiously across all groups. Even when there are OpenAPI definitions present in a catalog, they rarely contain the metadata needed to truly understand the capabilities of each API. Leaving developer and IT operations existing as black holes when it comes to enterprise capabilities, sucking up resources, but letting very little light out when it comes to what is happening on the inside. Making it very difficult for developers, architects, and business users to articulate what their enterprise capabilities are, and often times reinventing the wheel when it comes to what the enterprise delivers on the ground each day.