API Developer Outreach Research for the Department of Veterans Affairs: Part 3
#ICYDK: Key Practices for Driving and Sustaining Adoption of APIs
After a decade of leading tech companies operating API programs and a little over five years of government agencies following their lead, a number of common practices emerged that helped drive the adoption of APIs and support relationships between provider and consumer. We spent some time talking to API providers about their approaches, while also bringing our existing research and experience to the table, and have collected our responses and analysis below.
What We Learned
This is one area where we believe that our existing research outweighed what we learned in talking to API providers, but the conversations did reinforce what we know while also illuminating some new ways to look at operational components. Here are the key practices our interviewees provided for driving and sustaining the adoption of APIs. https://goo.gl/SuSNpQ
10 Rules for Designing a Successful API Program
Back in the mid to late 90s, the web was a weird, but growing, ecosystem. Enterprises sensed the potential, and a few actually knew how to work with it. Yet the one thing everyone knew was that being online was necessary. They didn’t know exactly why, and many just used it as a directory to provide a phone number and address, but there was a perceived need. As is common with new technologies the sense of urgency caused many companies to create an online presence before they knew what the goal was.
If you want to spend 10 minutes chuckling go to http://archive.org/web/ and see how the web used to be. Design apart, you will also realize how poor the quality and utility was. As time passed expectations rose exponentially. Soon companies realized creating a website just because your competitor did wasn’t a plan. It was better to take a couple months and come up with a strategy. That is the norm with most web iniatives; design and plan first, and then develop. https://goo.gl/cver1E
