Veterans Affairs
Managing APIs successfully at scale
Summary
The Veterans Affairs’ (VA) API Platform Management team needed insight into current best practices for API governance. So we built them a comprehensive research report that drew on a combination of our own expertise and information gathered from interviewing leading organizations.
The challenge
In preparation for gearing up the number of APIs delivered across the enterprise, the VA’s API Platform Management team needed to better understand best practices for governing APIs, particularly given the lack of formal research in this area.
The solution
To address this challenge, we conducted a research process that involved:
- Mining information related to API governance 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 governance at a diverse number of public- and private-sector organizations
- Analyzing and synthesizing our research information into a comprehensive report on API governance best practices, covering topic areas such as organizational models and standards
The results
- Delivered the project under the federal procurement micropurchase threshold of $10,000
- Interviewed seven different organizations, including the Government Digital Service (UK), HM Revenue & Customs (UK), Capital One, 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