Strategic advice to leverage new technologies
Technology is at the heart of nearly every enterprise, enabling new business models and strategies, and serving as the catalyst to industry convergence. Leveraging the right technology can improve business outcomes, providing intelligence and insights that help you make more informed and accurate decisions. From finding patterns in data through data science, to curating relevant insights with data analytics, to the predictive abilities and innumerable applications of AI, to solving challenging business problems with ML, NLP, and knowledge graphs, technology has brought decision-making to a more intelligent level. Keep pace with the technology trends, opportunities, applications, and real-world use cases that will move your organization closer to its transformation and business goals.
Insight
In this issue we take a close look at application programming interfaces (APIs). Now, APIs are both perennial and ubiquitous in computing. They've been around since the beginning and occur at every level of the IT stack -- from software-hardware interaction through system software to applications. They reside in protocols, libraries, and frameworks; in fact, they are intrinsic to the design of programming languages themselves. This raises the question: how can something so commonplace be causing so much excitement?
We have examined the results of CBR's survey on the implementation and management of an API program, trying to analyze not only what the survey tells us directly, but also the "white space" between the survey questions and answers. This admittedly involves some speculation on our part. However, comparing what would logically be expected from the theory of what the API economy is, with what the survey reveals, gives us some interesting insights.
Over the last decade, consumers have leveraged the Internet and phones to interact with businesses and thereby obtain a degree of self-service that did not exist before. These systems have provided consumers with access to information and the ability to execute transactions from anywhere. However, in the last few years we witnessed a drastic change in consumer behavior as smartphones started flooding the market and applications were developed to do almost everything from mobile devices.
First, there is the need for big-picture thinking and high levels of abstraction.
SURVEY DEMOGRAPHICS
This survey examined whether and how organizations are implementing and managing API programs, the drivers behind such programs, the factors that make for a successful API strategy, the challenges and risks, and deployment strategies and value creation. Sixty-one percent of the 152 responding organizations are headquartered in North America, another 20% in Europe, 11% in Asia/Australia/Pacific, 4% in Africa, 3% in Central and South America, and 1% in the Middle East.
In this Update, we focus on the corporate adoption, usage trends, and satisfaction with high-performance analytic databases.
Even today with Agile software development, it's comfortable to think that prescriptive strategies such as managing changing requirements in the form of a product backlog, holding a daily meeting where everyone answers three questions, having a single requirements owner (and thereby one neck to wring), and other such ideas will get the job done. But we all know that some of these "rules" are meant to be broken.
