Tailoring ITIL for the management of APIs

We are currently witnessing the rise of a new economy-the API economy-in which businesses are able to gain significant business value by exposing (parts of) their business assets as APIs. It is a new phenomenon that enables innovation by third parties and levels the playing field for businesses of different sizes and degrees of influence. It allows new products and services to be delivered in extremely short time frames and companies to reach markets and users that would normally be too costly or impossible to tap into otherwise. API economy. An economy in which companies expose their (internal) business assets or services in the form of (Web) APIs to third parties with the goal of unlocking additional business value. As much as the API economy is exciting and promising, it is also full of unknown and uncertain factors. We do not yet have a clear methodology for reliably achieving its promises and potential benefits. Simply exposing an API does not guarantee positive results. We need an effective way of getting the best out of the new economy. There are already a number of API management platforms out there, 1 but it will likely take some time for a mature and experience-proven methodology or framework to appear. However, we do not need to start from scratch. We can take as a basis an existing industry best practices framework such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), 2 which is a widely used framework for IT service management and covers the whole lifecycle of a service. It has a strong focus on business value and on alignment with business strategy and business objectives. In fact, if you replace the notion of service in ITIL with the notion of API in the API economy, you will find that the framework fits remarkably well with the management of APIs. API. A software interface that exposes certain business assets to other parties (systems and/or people). This application is not totally straightforward, though. The API economy has its own particularities and specifics that we will want to take into account. In this article, we propose an adaptation of the ITIL framework to suit APIs. Whenever possible, we make use of information from and experiences of businesses that are already taking part in the API economy. The methodology we describe here corresponds to the service strategy process of ITIL and should not be taken as a set of mandatory rules. Instead, we look at it as a practical starting point for businesses that want to expose their business assets as APIs.