Strengthening your API strategy through reuse

Organizations aiming to enhance their API strategy through reuse often face challenges in achieving this goal, as highlighted by Jennifer Craig James. While many companies embrace an API-first approach to digitizing capabilities, resulting in extensive API catalogs, true API reuse remains rare, with few APIs having multiple consumers. Common obstacles include a focus on service-based decomposition and team delivery efficiency, which tend to limit API reusability. To foster more effective reuse, organizations should shift towards a digital capability-centric approach, focusing on delivering outcomes and leveraging different types of API reuse, such as inter-domain, platform-level, and product-level reuse. Ensuring the discoverability of APIs through an API catalog is crucial, as it helps developers find and utilize existing APIs, thus preventing duplication and promoting reuse. By aligning API strategies with digital capabilities and enhancing discoverability, organizations can better achieve their API reusability goals.