Adopting an API Maturity Model to Accelerate Innovation

Digital transformation can impact every aspect of an organization when it’s done correctly. Unfortunately, a common side effect of digital transformation is addressing the problem of API maturity. APIs tend to become the bridges that drive business growth, but with widespread API acceptance, you can begin to get API sprawl. API sprawl results when you have an unplanned and unmanaged proliferation of APIs to address day-to-day business issues. API sprawl describes the exponentially large number of APIs being created and the physical spread of the distributed infrastructure locations where the APIs are deployed. 

Companies are seeing their APIs spread out across the globe at an unprecedented rate. This API sprawl presents a unique challenge for organizations wishing to maintain consistency in quality and experience among distributed infrastructure locations.

Managing APIs at scale requires oversight. It also requires a pragmatic approach that should start with an API program initiative that unifies APIs based on logical groupings. The program should package APIs as a product or service to drive adoption and facilitate management for their entire lifecycle. The challenge is that creating a viable program to manage API maturity is a slow process.

This article will offer a framework for building a mature API initiative. The framework uses a four-level API program maturity model that results in the evolution of a holistic API-driven business.

What is an API Maturity Model?

When considering the lifecycles and maturity of APIs, there are two phases: API maturity and API program maturity.

API maturity is specific to design and development and follows a process consistent with software development maturity. API maturity ensures that the APIs conform to recognized API specifications, such as REST. When discussing API maturity, you are talking about a set of APIs created for a specific application or purpose.

API program maturity takes priority when considering APIs on a companywide scale, i.e., the myriad of APIs a company amasses over time to meet various business objectives. With API program maturity, bundling APIs as unified services is necessary. An API program maturity model offers a benchmark to streamline APIs to promote business innovation.

The API Program Maturity Model

API program maturity assesses the non-functional metrics of APIs from the perspective of technology and business. The technical API metrics include performance, security, experience, and scalability. The business API metrics relate to improvements in processes and productivity that indirectly affect time and costs.

Like all well-thought-out business processes, API programs should start small and grow gradually. API programs must be structured to follow a continuous improvement cycle. Metrics should improve as the API program moves through a series of transitions from lower to higher maturity levels.

Before starting your journey through the API maturity model, you must start by perceiving APIs as tools. You will then progress through the model, perceiving APIs as components, models, and ecosystems as you reach higher maturity levels. Each level is viewed based on the APIs enabling everyday business processes.

The Four Levels of API Program Maturity

When you consider API program maturity as part of a holistic approach to corporate digital transformation, API programs can be characterized by four maturity levels:

Level 1: “The API Dark Age” - APIs as Tools for Data Acquisition

Historically, APIs have been built to facilitate data acquisition. The early APIs from Salesforce and Amazon are prime examples. Those types of APIs were designed to standardize data sharing across multiple business applications.

The first level of API program maturity is creating a standardized data access interface for data acquisition that offers a single source of truth. These types of APIs are categorized into different business functions. For example, you have separate APIs to access financials, sales, employee, and customer data.

Your organization achieves API Program Maturity Level 1 when you have established best practices for API design and architecture. Some examples of best practices include: 

• Designing APIs with ease of integration and reusability in mind
• Creating a consistent interface across all APIs
• Incorporating versioning in the design to support multiple clients simultaneously
• Ensuring scalability of the APIs to accommodate changing user needs

However, these APIs are relatively simple and don’t require advanced programmable capabilities. Level 1 is also defined by a relatively immature, hand-cranked approach to API deployment. Manual deployment of individual APIs does not support closely-knit API lifecycle management. The technical focus is on building better APIs as standalone tools.

Level 2: “The API Renaissance” - APIs as Components for Process Integration

When reviewing the history of API development, APIs started to see a renaissance in the 2000s when they started to be leveraged as connectors to integrate different systems. Single sign-on (SSO) is a prime example. SSO is widely used as an API integration tool to authenticate users for secure access to multiple applications and third-party services.

When your organization reaches API Program Maturity Level 2, your API program will use a component-based approach. The component-based approach involves breaking down an application into its separate components. This means that each component can be developed and tested independently from the other parts of the application and then integrated to form a complete application. This approach reduces complexity, simplifies maintenance, and improves scalability.

APIs will be bundled as components that integrate different business and domain-specific processes. These API bundles streamline operations and workflows and connect multiple departments. They may even extend to integrate workflows and interactions with external partners.

Your organization takes its first steps toward utilizing APIs for business when you reach Level 2. By approaching APIs as components, Level 2 maturity gives you a catalog of APIs that are standardized and reusable. Level 2 also advances API development and lifecycle management by improving development cycles, focusing on standardization and streamlined automation through CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines.

Level 3: “The Age of API Enlightenment” - APIs as Platforms for a Unified Experience

APIs are treated as components during the API renaissance to simplify integration and reusability. Level 3 is the API Enlightenment Age and extends development further to make APIs more user-friendly and valuable.

When you reach Level 3, APIs are no longer considered components or discrete tools that improve business workflows. The focus is now on building API suites that drive better workflows by creating a connected experience. Recall that API components enable API providers to break down applications while designing and building. API suites refer to how API providers group their functionality so that API consumers can integrate with them for a better experience.

For example, a logistics company relies on a fleet of trucks and delivery vans for business continuity. It will use an API suite to monitor and manage all aspects of its fleet. At Level 3, you expect a well-conceived API suite that incorporates multiple APIs to handle everything from monitoring individual trucks to mapping routes and providing analytics for fleet performance.

At Level 3, APIs are pivotal in defining the user experience (UX). The API suite becomes the backbone of user-facing applications. In our truck fleet example, the front-end software the company uses for fleet management relies on APIs to drive the end-user experience, so the API suite becomes the backend platform that provides the interface for the entire software package.

When you reach Level 3, the API program now plays an essential role since the API suite is elevated to a mission-critical service. At this stage, API consumers become heavily invested, and API reliability and maturity are highly important. Any API program operating at Level 3 attains a degree of technical maturity, including:

• Deployment: You use the batched deployment of the API suite, and it’s closely coupled with API lifecycle stages and version control. 
• Performance: APIs support a cloud-native environment for better scalability and elastic workloads to handle data traffic.
• Security: Multi-layered security is enabled to ensure strict authentication and authorization procedures.
• Automation: The CI/CD pipeline is fully automated, including rigorous API testing.
• Experience: A self-service API portal is also in place for speedier developer onboarding.

Level 4: “The Age of API Liberalization” - APIs as Ecosystems for Business Transformation

When your organization reaches API program maturity Level 4, you will have fully externalized APIs as products. This final stage of API evolution is driven more by business needs than technology. You may already have a well-oiled technology stack at this level and are driving API adoption among internal and partner stakeholders because APIs generate a lot of business value. The next logical progression is to externalize this value by monetizing it.

With Level 4, you are adopting a new approach, API-as-a-Product. At this level, APIs may be offered to customers using an as-as-service (AAS) subscription model. Depending on the nature of your company's business, API-as-a-Product can be provided as a standalone or complementary service. Either way, the APIs are tightly integrated into your product, marketing, and sales organizations, so everyone can collaborate to boost this newfound revenue stream.

At the Level 4 program maturity level, the API program becomes the business growth engine. Some indicators that you have achieved Level 4 include:

API Governance: 

You have a dedicated API product management group. This group ensures that all APIs are developed based on a predefined set of rules. It also defines API lifecycle progression policies and ensures APIs adhere to architectural and security compliances.

API Observability: 

Your team goes beyond standard monitoring of APIs, capturing the internal state of API business logic to gather actionable intelligence data about performance.

API Ecosystem:

You have also built an API community for developers and consumers to exchange views and seek support. API advocacy forums further augment your API ecosystem to bolster the adoption of APIs.

The API Program Improvement Cycle

No API program is ever perfect. Any API governance framework must have a provision for periodic audits to determine the current maturity level of any API program.

Regardless of the API maturity level, adopting a DevOps approach to improve API maturity using small sprints continuously is necessary. Applying a DevOps approach also requires building an organizational-wide consensus to adopt a more agile and faster improvement cycle with small increments.

The ideal API program improvement cycle consists of five stages:

1. Assess and Explore: 

The first stage is to assess the current state of the API program at both a technology and business level and explore possibilities to improve it. However, technological maturity precedes business maturity and should be the core focus of maturity Levels 1 and 2 above. 

It also is essential to set small goals as sub-levels when exploring areas to improve rather than trying to leapfrog from one level to the next. You can define these sub-levels internally to improve one specific aspect of the API program, such as deployment automation, security, or scalability.

2. Design and Recommend: 

This second stage is the most crucial decision point in the improvement cycle. You collate the technical specifications and business objectives from different stakeholders at this stage. Then you can recommend changes in the underlying API management tech stack that should be part of the current improvement cycle.

3. Build and Implement: 

Stage three is the implementation stage of the improvement cycle. This stage encompasses development and configuration enhancements based on the proposed recommendations.

4. Test and Monitor: 

In stage four, the rubber meets the road, and you test-drive the API ride. This stage is when you monitor vital performance and improvement metrics to gauge the overall effectiveness of the API improvement cycle. This stage also tends to be prolonged since you must transition back and forth with stage three until the metrics show measurable improvement.

5. Operate New API Program: 

Once the test and monitor stage is complete and you see real improvement, the final stage is production deployment, where you productionize the new API program and get it up and running.

Level Up Your API Program Maturity Today

The different levels of API program maturity presented here should provide a clear pathway with logical milestones to help your organization transition from a low to a high level of API implementation. However, there is a more significant challenge you will need to tackle.

Your API program symbolizes the organizational-wide ethos of adopting additional APIs. It’s an ideal vision that positions API evolution as one of the primary engines driving business growth. However, for any API program to succeed, it must be established as a horizontal function that cuts across departments and teams.

In most enterprises, each department needs more clarity and visibility into other departments. This is one of the reasons why it takes a lot of work to enforce governance and standardization. This also increases the chance of creating duplicate APIs due to a lack of visibility.

API team silos can present several challenges, such as a lack of communication, understanding, and visibility. When teams are siloed from each other, creating an integrated strategy for API development can be challenging. Additionally, each team may have different priorities, leading to delays and errors throughout the process. Furthermore, when teams are siloed from each other, there may be limited opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing, which could otherwise improve the quality of the API being developed.

A horizontal API program function cuts across this interdepartmental siloing and helps to ensure consistent governance and standardization of APIs.

Here are a few overarching rules you can apply to counter any challenges to the continuous improvement cycles:

Outside-in Consensus Building: 

An outside-in approach requires analyzing business workflows to devise the right digital experiences around them. Rather than adopting an inside-out approach ("build it, and they will come"), an outside-in approach is much more effective at capturing the expectations of the various stakeholders.

Top-down Cultural Shift: 

Finding the best way to drive a companywide cultural shift is a highly debatable topic. Since horizontal alignment is required for a successful API program, adopting a top-down rather than bottoms-up approach has less likelihood of creating unfettered API sprawl.

The top-down approach to API development offers several advantages, including improved time-to-market, shorter development cycles, and easier maintenance. It also allows for a greater degree of clarity when it comes to the architecture of the API. This makes it easier for developers to know what they have to work with and where their responsibilities lie in the overall project. Additionally, a top-down approach can reduce the effort needed to ensure the APIs are secure, reliable, and well-documented.

Strategic Point of View: 

The initial levels of API program maturity consider APIs as another part of the technical toolkit. Remember that this is a short-term, tactical perspective. As your API program continues to evolve, it is essential to continuously strive towards building a strategic vision. That way, the API program starts delivering value that can be measured in business-level KPIs.

Working your way to the highest API program maturity level will take time and effort while simultaneously managing stakeholder expectations. However, developing a mature API program will unlock new opportunities for accelerated business innovation, leading to growth.