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

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