APIs are about more than just consumer web sites and experimental tech sandboxes, however. While Salesforce.com generates 50 percent of its revenue from its APIs and eBay 60 percent, according to ProgrammableWeb, businesses also can use them internally for improved operations.
In fact, APIs already may be moving away from public use and toward a model of privately sharing data, according to Deloitte Consulting’s Tech Trends 2015 report.
API success story Netflix now sees roughly 99.97 percent of its API traffic between services and devices. What was once a tool for reaching new audiences and creating mashups has become a driver for enabling overall business strategy and efficiency, according to Deloitte. This is underscored by the discontinuation of the Netflix public API program last June. For Netflix and other firms, APIs are a way to improve business operations.
There are many ways that APIs can improve operations, according to David Sisk, Deloitte Consulting director and co-author of the chapter on the API revolution in the Tech Trends report.
“Look for opportunities in areas where there is significant volumes of transaction, high degree of human interaction, or information coupled with process that enable value,” he says.
Here are five places to start when considering how APIs can streamline business operations at your company.
1. Break down operational silos
APIs can be packaged and repackaged as a mixture of current and new data sources to break down the silos of networks and data, a move that can improve operational nimbleness.
“Organizations are often built around data ownership,” says Sisk. “Where data can be shared, it should be.”
For example, businesses can improve sales operations by mixing data from several departments. APIs can bring together live CRM data, customer support, and inventory and buying propensity data in the case of sales, for instance.
Field service personnel also can use APIs to grab logistics, location, inventory, outage/failure and customer data, a merging of otherwise siloed data that can increase customer satisfaction and reduce response times.
2. Better promotional programs with partners
APIs can enable businesses to better share promotion-specific data with partners in real-time, which can cut down on fraud and deliver a better user experience to customers.
“Today, client promotional programs are increasingly complex,” says Jeffrey Schaubschlager, the senior vice president of digital services for marketing and promotions firm, Young America. “A single client program is likely to have multiple API connection points to ensure we are able to securely access program-specific information, such as a list of active promotion codes or eligible products, real-time, to validate and verify submission information.”
Through using APIs to automatically share data, customer service also can be streamlined for these promotions.
“Due to APIs, we’re able to give promotion participants real-time information about the status of their offer approval and can even provide information into why they haven’t qualified versus waiting for a mail-in entry to be processed,” Schaubschlager says.
3. Increased automation
There was a time when office work largely was about paper pushing, which is another way of saying that moving around business data was not automated. With APIs, businesses can greatly reduce the manual component of moving data among systems.
“The current system and website paradigms require a human to integrate the systems by looking at the screen and typing information retrieved from one system into the other,” notes Sisk. “APIs enable communication directly between computer systems, lowering the need for human involvement.”
This automation saves time, improves operational speed, and of course cuts down on human error.
Automatically modifying data is one area where businesses should think about API use internally; APIs can cleanse, standardize and append data entering a business system.
4. Bridge the gap with legacy systems
APIs can manage the interaction between legacy systems such as procurement, financials and personnel and the fast-moving front-end applications such as mobile apps, analytics and businesses exchanges.
While businesses cannot always immediately update their legacy systems to react to changing market conditions, they can bridge the gap by connecting the data from legacy systems with the newer technologies through an API.
5. Enable more self-serve data use
Amazon is famous for its internal API use, and Jess Bezos once purportedly said that he would fire anyone who didn’t expose corporate assets to others in the company through an API.
So much of a business is now founded on data, not making data easy to use and share internally is a significant waste of corporate resources. APIs enable better use by making it easy for teams to access and work with company data.
Self-serve also can play a powerful role with partner relationships.
APIs enable companies to quickly integrate data or services from a business into their own business processes and products. At the same time, control and usage is retained.
“Think outside of the box when it comes to self-service,” says Sisk. “The status quo has been disrupted in a significant number of businesses that didn’t see APIs or new business models coming.”
Like any good set of building blocks, API use to streamline business processes is only limited by the imagination. Forward-thinking companies are thinking hard and coming up with new internal uses for the technology.
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