James Higginbotham

API Architect

GlueCon 2013 Notes: 3 Things You Need to Turn Your Enterprise Into a Platform – Laura Merling, AT&T

1 minute read

Keynote: 3 Things You Need to Turn Your Enterprise Into a Platform – Laura Merling, AT&T (@magicmerl)

  • The Journey
    • AT&T’s journey: IT as a Platform (current) -> Network enabled cloud (12 months) -> Entire business on APIs (2-5 years)
    • You must know that it is a long journey – set your goals:
      • 1. Find areas that can reduce costs and cycle time
      • 2. Simplify the way you do business
      • 3. Find ways to improve partner relationships
  • A Product to Sell Worth Selling
    • First had to organize the input – who is involved (external/internal), what they want, then prioritize
    • Engage your customers – they had partners that wanted to work with them to build APIs and take to market
    • What are the baseline things you need to bring an API to market? You need a way to evaluate and report API readiness
    • The 3 “G” Model: Monthly and Quarterly
      • Identification – API strategy and prioritization
      • Actualization – Definitiona and realization
      • Operations – Deployment and Support
    • Methodology they just used
      • Evaluate Cost Opportunity
      • Map Cost to a Business Function
      • Map Cost to organization
      • Estimate Possible Volume Benefit
      • Test Benefits
    • They estimate saving 10% over the next three years by using this methodology
  • Self-service with Full Service
    • Discovery of services, both public, private, and protected (partners have access to)
    • Enterprises may need a workflow to determine partnership level when onboarding API access, without requiring a manual process
    • Community and paid support for APIs
    • Concierge support to help with onboarding/consumption
  • Find Things in Common
    • Lots of things being duplicated within the enterprise
    • Need to know what your platform is, then find the common components/services and build upon them (e.g. billing, security, auth/auth, provisioning, monetization)
    • Took 4 months and 6 teams to agree upon the common platform at AT&T; however, cost savings by avoiding redundant development
    • Started with Authentication, Consent Management, Monetization (everyone needed them and wanted to build them)
    • Need to avoid channel conflict around pricing structures (platforms vs. products)
    • Be value-driven, not time-driven – define and share KPIs across business and IT
  • I found this recent video of a similiar presentation on InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Enterprise-Platform

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