
The API economy
With
automation taking over every aspect of business and personal roles, It became
important that services offered by different entities belonging to both
government and private enterprises be integrated into one pool for the consumer
of these services to access and utilize them in a much easier way. The
accomplishment of this integration has been made easier by use of “APIs”, which
stands for Application Programming Interface. The API economy the becomes the
reality by which we live with as software becomes the soul of enterprise in a
world where business entities have to go the extra mile to not only sell to their customers but retain them as well
through daily engagements wherever they are as a way of relating to them.
Brands that
command big customer numbers and followers have gone ahead to become social
networks in their respective industries. This creates an opportunity for them
by facilitating other entities and startups to tap into their customer
ecosystem by becoming advertisement platforms or gateways through which
business transactions can be implemented to enhance trust and efficiency. They
do this by creating APIs that integrate their services into the platforms of
other entities to facilitate aspects such as payments, advertisements, job
scheduling, data interpretation and much more. APIs therefore serve as tools
that can facilitate entry into new markets, search for new customers, enable
buying and selling, obtain customer feedback, data analysis and much more.
APIs have
also made it easier to come up with business applications that not only cost
less but are also capable of accomplishing more tasks within a short period in
addition to minimal implementation costs. An easier way of understanding this
would be to use the electrical model where one does not require skills in
electrical engineering to power domestic gadgets but only plug their gadgets
into a socket that powers up their gadget. Let us take the example of content
management systems that are developed with the intention of making it easy to
setup e-commerce platforms. They have been enabled with connectivity to
external services that facilitate payments, sending emails, reputation
management through reviews and feedback, analytical tools to help better
understand the customer journey and much more. APIs have made this possible by
making it easy for web designers to implement fully functional e-commerce
platforms with zero or minimal programming knowledge and in a much shorter
period of time.
The
emergence of shared economy today owes its existence to a large extent to APIs
that enable businesses to transact easily with their clientele. The success of
businesses that are defining the possibility of a shared economy like
taxi-hailing apps, digital products downloads, accommodation reservation and
many others have taken advantage of APIs to create business efficiency in their
respective industries as well as digital trust with their customers. This leads
to these brands becoming an important aspect of the daily lives of their
customers. APIs have also taken their rightful place in the blockchain
technology, with bias to cryptocurrencies becoming adopted as acceptable means
of payments across various platforms in exchange for goods and services.
With the API
marketplace manifesting unimaginable possibilities with much ease and
affordable costs, their security possibility must not be allowed to overcome
all benefits and possibilities that we have discussed. This could lead to
tampering of payment information by customers or access to customer data that
is confidential that would by assurance lead to not only loss of customers but
also build a barrier that would make it very difficult to recruit new customers
due to a poor rating of an organization’s reputation. This can be attributed to
the realization that APIs not only facilitate connectivity between platforms
for both sellers and buyers but have also been taken to task to secure the
information that they share through the interconnectivity that they provide.
APIs have
therefore enabled business leaders to define their organizational objectives
around hierarchy enforcement through duty allocation, workflows and
well-designed interfaces. They also aid in deciding the stages at which
applications get integrated to facilitate engagement between partners and their
customers so as to maintain healthy business relationships. We can conclude
that the shift from software-enabled processes to API-enabled processes is all
about making these processes to be flexibly programmable as a way of making
them adapt to the ever-changing needs that are necessary for an organization to
remain relevant in its operations.
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