Veterans Affairs
Expanding the adoption of APIs
Summary
The Veterans Affairs’ (VA) API Platform Management team wanted to increase adoption of their APIs. We developed a comprehensive research report on how the VA can accomplish that goal, based on a combination of our own expertise and information gathered from interviewing leading organizations.
The challenge
Recognizing that simply making datasets and APIs available doesn’t guarantee success, the VA wanted to expand the adoption of their APIs. They needed insight into how to build and sustain an effective developer outreach program.
The solution
To address this challenge, we conducted a research process that involved:
- Mining information related to API developer outreach from our decade’s worth of existing primary and secondary research, which amounts to over 3,000 API-related articles
- Augmenting this research by interviewing key people responsible for API developer outreach at a diverse number of public- and private-sector organizations
- Analyzing and synthesizing our research information into a comprehensive report on API developer outreach best practices, covering topic areas such as funnel metrics and developer sandbox environments
The results
- Delivered the project under the federal procurement micropurchase threshold of $10,000
- Interviewed seven different organizations, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Blue Button API program, the Census Bureau, OpenFEC, and more
- Published the report in the open and with no copyright, making it free to anyone who wants to learn from and reuse the content