Enterprise API Intake or Demand Creation Process

Enterprise API Objective

Every enterprise wants to operate either as #1 or #2 player in their domain and to do so they follow different strategy like acquisition, merger and extending their core capabilities. API strategy is one such which provides a leap frogging on technology, adaptiveness and business stretch-ability. Below are the objectives which drives API strategy across organisations.

Compete as a transformed enterprise - Increase speed to market for new products to satisfy business goals.

Enhance the enterprise’s agility and flexibility - Provide a simple self-service catalogue of reusable components. 

Expand Innovation - Build a partner ecosystem and omni-channel community. Enable a self-service market place for external partners to create innovative products.  Leverage external collaboration at minimal cost to Adopting Organisation.

Drive Operational Efficiency - Create a target operating model which includes life cycle governance processes, product development, security model and DevOps environment to drive automated, continuous integration and delivery.

Agile Adoption - Increase the adoption of Agile development to drive higher quality product delivery and increase delivery speed.

Self Service - Reduce development, maintenance and functional duplication effort by building targeted lightweight components that are inexpensive to create and change.

Enable self-serve access to the APIs and Digital Assets via Developer Portal and Sandbox

Whereas the executives focused on some fundamental aspects of the engagement to ensure the overall success and outcomes of the program such as

Collaboration & Expertise: The Senior Executives are engaged as project executives. They want to improve the collaboration across the functional areas to leverage the diverse expertise in defining, building and delivering innovative banking products to their customers. This collaboration allows the organisation to adopt a customer-centric viewpoint in establishing strategies and roadmaps.

Alignment & Acceleration: Senior Executives align funded product owners to iteratively and quickly define, test and deploy new products to market. This alignment allows senior executives to validate products and quickly change direction to response to market needs and trends.

Mitigation & Efficiency: Senior Executives collaborating and aligning across line of business to build componentized products enable the identification, isolation and mitigation of potential issues. This enables fast discovery and course correction capability.

Delivery & Quality: Senior Executives leverages standardized architectural and operational frameworks to drive better quality of deliverables, smaller releases and continue delivery of new products that address the market.

Agile & Reliable: Sr Executives using an Agile approach are able to operate with additional flexibility. By including the use of a continuous feedback loop on products through the entire lifecycle, they can address fast changing market needs.

Share & Build: Sr Executives using a shared repository or developers’ portal, gain visibility into product development activities across lines of business, enabling them to leverage, share and align ideas in new products.

Business Needs: A product development, collaboration, and line of business alignment processes. A component catalog that supports self-service access to consumable assets. A secure continuous development and delivery framework that support shorter release cycles. An application architecture that supports multi-speed IT and omnichannel delivery. 

Value drivers for API Transformation

•      Adopt Best Practices to enhance an improved Enterprise Architecture.

•      Center of Practice to provide best practices, patterns, thought leadership and subject matter expertise to enable a digital transformation.

•      Faster Provisioning, Lower Cost, Workload Elasticity.

•      Scalable development teams to deliver Viable Products (MVP) and Proof of Concepts (POC), aligned to business objectives and priorities.

API Demand Creation Stages

Central API Core Team who drives the development and implementation of governance and integration architecture at intended Organization needs the following Inputs to produce the intended value to the organizational API Initiative.

•      A standardized application architecture framework and best practices. A collaborative organization structure with the DevOps team. Self-service catalog component.

•      A development Sandbox. Visibility of system information. Shorten development life cycle (fast and easy). 

•      The API Core Team Connects with business and IT teams to provide input and validate product development activities.

•      During initial scoping exercises, the API Core Team actively participates in the sessions and brings sample use cases from the digital projects in order to apply and adopt best practices.

•      When the API Core Team provides their input, the product idea is ready for executive approval and confirmation of feasibility.

•      After gaining approval, the API Core Team prepares the product architecture, leveraging hybrid staffing model that is complemented by Center of Practice SMEs.

•      Through a  continuous Delivery System (DevOps), the team is able to produce components in shorter cycles that can be reliably released at any time.

•      After the new product goes live, API Core Team ensures re-usable components are stored in the Developer Portal Catalog for use across the enterprise.

Planned Transitions

Defining Phase – Establishing Target Operating Model & Build books

•      Identify initiatives and resources

•      Implement TOM

•      Leverage TOM as a pilot for design of initial Pilot APIs

Foundational Phase

•      Refine TOM based on lessons learned from initial design of Pilot APIs

•      Implement TOM and full governance process

•      Set up Development Factory and DevSecOps

•      Build the Pilot APIS

Scale

•      Implement Agile culture & extend DevSecOps program

•      Implement Pipeline Intake Process

•      Train Architects, Developers, and Product Owners

•      Identify and prioritize existing apps and services for modernization

API Drive needs a Program CEO called Product Leader –

Product Leader defines all aspects of the products. This includes the product function, target market, the goals and metrics. 

·      Product owner drives the development of the products. He/she defines the idea, target market, goals and metrics of the products. He/she collaborates with senior executive and API Core Team to validate and gain approval of the products.

·      Product owner aligns the product idea with the Organization strategy and build a product business plan.

·      Product owners collaborate with the development team on a daily basis to ensure the product meets their goals. This compresses the life cycle, increases the quality of the deliverable and mitigates the risk of not meeting the market expectation.

·      Product owner certifies that the built products meet their requirements. They participate in build, testing, deployment and monitor the consumer consumption of the products.

·      The product owner reviews metrics from a customer consumption of the product and modifies or adds to future product releases.

·      The product owner captures all product related artifacts in a shared repository or developers’ portal where all work can be accessed across teams and continued as business priorities change.

·       

·      Needs of product leader: A clearly defined product definition and continuous market feedback process. A product development and funding process and end to end participation in the full development to release life cycle.

Outcomes that give enough sense of achievability

Measurables

·      Shorter Release Cycle

·      Fewer Defects

·      Reduce Duplicity

·      Re-use Across Organizations

Enablers for the API Transformation

·      Center of Practice

·      Developer Portal

·      Internal reusable Assets

API Enablement can be extended for the following use-cases.

·      Exposing System of Record to New Ways of Engagement

·      Accelerate Internal Development

·      Expand the reach of your business internally and externally

·      Build Hybrid Cloud Applications

·      Charge Back for Data and Service

·      Stream Line Integration of internal Assets

Develop Ecosystem to generate revenue