Book Review: APIs: A Strategy Guide

Book Review: APIs: A Strategy Guide by Daniel Jacobson, Greg Brail, and Dan Woods: Publisher- O’Reilly: ISBN- 13: 978-1449308926

This is one of the first books on strategic part of API in software industry. APIs: A Strategy Guide is not for developers or designers but for non-technical folks of Software industry – PMs, Business Development staff, C Level Executives and anyone who is interested in Software marketing and Sales and its management.

Book is written in very lucid manner though in initial chapters same information and facts are repeated but still overall book maintains good flow.

Mix of Authors makes good combination. Provider of API related products and Services - Greg Brail, CTO Apigee , customer - Daniel Jacobson, Director of Engineering Netflix API and Researcher, Speaker, & Entrepreneur - Dan Woods.

Book is consisting of eleven chapters and each chapter takes a dive into API strategy and business. Neither a deep dive nor a shallow one.

Book is certainly a good read and going to be on my book shelf for long time.

Disclaimer: I did not get paid to review this book, and I do not stand to gain anything if you buy the book. I got this book as reviewer from publisher. I do not have any relationship with the author.

Further reading: A complementary book is REST API Design Rulebook by Mark Masse and RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity by Subbu Allamaraju.

One can get more information about book and related topics from:

1. Book at Aamazon: http://www.amazon.com/APIs-Strategy-Guide-Daniel-Jacobson/dp/1449308929
2. Apigee: http://apigee.com/
3. Publisher: Orielly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920021223.do

Few Questions to CIO/CTOs

1. What percentage of your IT budget dedicated to:

• Human Resource

• o Employee
• o Contractors
• o Consultants

• Outsourcing – Off shoring, Near shoring, On shoring
• Internal training/ workshops
• External training/workshops/seminars
• Proof of Concepts
• Demonstrations

• Centre of Excellence
• Software maintenance
• o In house developed
• o Packaged
• New software development
• o In house developed
• o Packaged
• Hardware maintenance (servers, printers, desktops, network, etc)
• o Employee managed
• o Outsourced managed
• New hardware procurement (servers, printers, desktops, network, etc)
• Help desk

2. What percentage of your IT budget dedicated to:

• Innovate
• Respond to competitive threats
• Optimize IT for existing business processes
• To keep status quo
• All other activities

3. What percentage of budget focuses on long terms IT strategy and on short term tactical decisions?
4. What percentage of projects requested by business that cannot be accommodated each quarter/year?
5. What is the financial impact of not accommodated projects – On IT department, Business units and Enterprise?
6. What percentage of data is not good enough (or incorrect) and its financial impact?
7. What percentage of IT dept activities is not compliant to regulations? What would be the financial impact on enterprise if this will ever become a challenge/issue?
8. What percentage of activities/tasks are person or small group dependent?
9. What percentages of IT systems are outdated and are on unsupported tools/technologies/platforms?
10. What percentages of Business processes are on outdated and unsupported tools/technologies/platforms?
11. What percentage of systems cannot be changed without significant risks due unavailability of documentation and original team?
12. What is the cost of maintaining teams to change systems if required ever?
13. What percentage systems to be touched to accommodate a change request from Business (Simple, medium and complex nature)?
14. What percentage of license cost, using Open Source systems can be saved? Its impact on resource and maintenance cost.
15. What percentage of development and license cost can be saved using:
a. Out sourcing
b. Cloud (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS)
16. What is the cost of not leveraging 3rd party capabilities (business/technical services, components, data, etc) due to difficulty in integration with existing systems?
17. What is the smallest size of project IT department can handle in cost effective way?
18. What is the incremental cost to enterprise of not being able to adopt tools/technologies/platforms that exhibits lower Total cost of ownership (TCO).
19. How effective IT department is capturing matrices, which can be used to improve business process in IT departments and beyond.
20. How many projects overshoot from budgeted time and money?
21. How integrated the IT strategy with business strategy?