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Whether it’s news feeds, online shopping, or navigation systems, the variety of new cloud, mobile and internet of things (IoT) solutions are changing how we work, play and shop. Businesses also benefit from increased visibility and productivity, as well as from new opportunities to lower costs and streamline operations. It’s no wonder companies in every industry are rushing to participate by "opening" their applications (news feeds, laboratory results, manufacturing lines, etc.) to allow other systems to interact with them.
There’s just one problem. If organizations don’t adequately manage how they open their systems, the interactions will eventually fail, wreaking havoc on the hybrid solutions they create. The technology enabling this interaction is the application programming interface (API). One use of an API is to help developers build larger applications, including the inputs, outputs and basic operations. Very simply, if a health management system (HMS) wants to be able to pull the results from a laboratory application, the HMS needs to understand how to connect to the laboratory application, input a medical record number, request a test result, and receive the output. The API tells the HMS how to do these things.
Our increasing reliance on APIs has given rise to what many are calling the API Economy, an apt label given the billions of API calls that now take place every day. But what if these API calls stop working? What if our favorite apps suddenly stop delivering? It can happen if the companies developing and publishing APIs don’t adequately manage them. The key to this is API Management. API Management provides exposed, unique corporate assets for use by third-party developers to support new devices and create new apps (mobile is a prime example) that can affect our everyday life.
Here are five increasingly essential daily life activities, along with five ways API management can impact them:
API Management Issue: Mobile Enablement
The numerous mobile apps that you use on your smart phones and other mobile devices are supported by API Management systems. APIs expose unique corporate assets that developers use to create mobile apps. And when you use the app, API Management systems securely provision the app, delivering the data and providing useful information -- for example, local restaurants, hotels and gas prices. Or they can provide entertainment value through games or video streaming.
API Management Issue: Complexity
From farm to processing to packaging to distribution to store shelves…supply chains are highly complex, and today’s supply chains are highly dependent on APIs. A disruption anywhere (an out-of-date API, for example) can have a ripple effect that leaves a store shelf empty for days or weeks. Supply chain systems must include centralized visibility into the operation of every API in the chain.
API Management Issue: Scale
Every time you go to an online shopping site, compare products from different manufacturers, read reviews, and use a shopping cart, you are relying on dozens of APIs to work flawlessly. The more people use the site -- think about Cyber Monday -- the more stress is placed on APIs to handle the throughput. Without adequate API management to support the needs of consumer demand, your customer experience will include delays, error messages, and unavailable products -- with the problems increasing with each new customer.
API Management Issue: Time to Value
Whether you drive a car for business, have teenage children heading off to college, or just don’t have a good sense of direction, nothing beats a good navigation system that pulls in traffic and weather information and has the ability to search for restaurants, gas stations and other services. Here the burden is on the supplying companies to develop and update their APIs so drivers always have access to the latest information. API management must provide the tools developers need to rapidly create and publish APIs. Otherwise, arrival estimates may be off, addresses may be wrong, and a Starbucks may be nowhere in sight.
API Management Issue: Governance
Nowhere is API management more important than in being able to secure what third-party applications have access to, especially when systems contain private and otherwise sensitive information. With proper API management, organizations gain the visibility and control they need to ensure API operation is in compliance with business and regulatory requirements.
API Management is likely enhancing your life every day and you don’t even realize it. Conversely, if you are cursing technology because an application is failing, more often than not, it is because an application is depending on an interface that is not being well managed. Business success depends on customer satisfaction. Therefore, business success ultimately depends on API Management.
Image Credit: Profit_Image / Shutterstock
Michael Morton is the CTO of Dell Boomi, where he is responsible for product innovation.
Analytics can be worthless, counterproductive and even harmful when based on data that isn’t high quality. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. So when Salesforce Analytics Cloud hit the market, vendors rushed to announce plugins that would load high-quality data into the solution.
The painful truth is that without high-quality data, it doesn’t matter how fast or sophisticated the analytics capability is. You simply won’t be able to turn all that data managed by IT into effective business execution.
The impact of bad data
Let’s look at a few common scenarios. These are based on real experiences, although I’ve left out the company names to protect the guilty.
If you don’t know how dirty your data is, you don’t know what opportunities you’re missing. To put some numbers behind the potential harm of bad data, let’s look at a hypothetical direct mail marketing campaign. Imagine you spend $20,000 per month on a campaign to a highly targeted set of 100,000 customers in a specific market. Assume the annual cost of this program would be $240,000 (excluding employee and other operational costs). Based on previous experience, you know that each conversion from the campaign will result in a $100 gain in revenue, and you can count on about a 5 percent success rate, generating revenue of $500,000. After subtracting the $240,000 annual cost, the total annual profit for the program would equal $260,000.
But if your data quality is poor and your error rate is 50 percent (a not uncommon issue for enterprise sales and marketing departments due to duplicates, incorrect addresses, outdated lists, and so forth), the revenue would be cut in half to only $250,000, slashing the total annual profit for the program to just $10,000. If you include operational costs, you are likely losing money on the program.
To make matters worse, the pace of business is constantly accelerating, and organizations, along with their customers and partners, increasingly expect access to real-time and near real-time data. But let’s face it, it makes no sense -- and would be potentially disastrous-- simply to deliver bad data faster!
Ensuring high-quality data
To ensure sales and marketing teams always have access to high-quality data, organizations need to develop data management capabilities to ensure their data has been:
Providing these capabilities is the role of master data management (MDM), a proven technology that until recently has been far too expensive for all but the largest companies to afford because it required the deployment of multiple systems from multiple vendors. Mid-market companies simply don’t have the time, budget or resources to purchase, deploy and manage multiple new systems.
Now, however, vendors have begun offering single platforms that include all of the essential MDM capabilities. Even better, some vendors offer their solution as a cloud-based service, eliminating the upfront costs as well as dramatically reducing the time and complexity of deploying the solution and managing the environment. MDM solutions can also feed solutions for complex event processing (CEP) and real-time analytics to ensure the deepest and most accurate insight at the speed of today’s businesses.
Every organization today depends on data to understand its customers and employees, design new products, reach target markets, and plan for the future. Accurate, complete, and up-to-date information is essential if you want to optimize your decision making, avoid constantly playing catch-up and maintain your competitive advantage.
Photo credit: Andrey_Popov / Shutterstock
Michael Morton is the CTO of Dell Boomi, where he is responsible for product innovation. Michael joined Dell Boomi in 2013 after an impressive and successful career with IBM, where he became and IBM Master Inventor and worked directly with Fortune 100 Companies. He has been innovating and producing a wide-range of enterprise IT solutions for over 20 years. This includes being a founding developer of IBM WebSphere Application Server, as well as providing architecture leadership on the IBM InfoSphere data integration and IBM Tivoli systems management family of products. Michael’s broad experience coupled with his deep understanding of the complexities and challenges enterprise customers face when modernizing and attempting to remain competitive in the their industry rounds out his superb qualifications for the Chief Technology Officer position.