building a business-facing mobile developer community

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MobileDeveloper

Community

SOA Software


Andy Jones

• 25 years in complex systems

• Usually starting with someone

saying or writing “How could we

possibly achieve …”

• It’s about …

• New ideas

• From concept to production

• And I started with …

Big ideas require small ideas:

Project 1 => 22 patents


Sir Dave Brailsford

“it’s important to understand the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’. Put

simply….how small improvements in a number of different aspects of

what we do can have a huge impact to the overall performance of the

team.”

Olympics Gold Silver Bronze

2000 1 1 2

2008 7 4 2

GB Track Cycling


Idea

Generation

The Innovation Value Chain

Innovation is not the product of logical thought,

although the result is tied to logical structure

Albert Einstein

Idea

ConversionIdea Diffusion

Value

Ref: Hansen and Birkinshaw

London Business School

Too

few

Can’t

select

Can’t

execute

Can’t

collaborate


Roles and Functions


API – Benefits and Challenges

• Benefits

– Productivity• Many hands

• Outsourced model

• Natural risk sharing

– Innovation

– Flexibility

– Re-use

• Challenges

– Security

– Sustaining benefit as deployment become increasingly entangled

– Understanding usage and costs of shared resources

– ? Consistent adoption across a complex enterprise

– ? Cost of compliance


Enough Problems !

Solutions ?


Outside -> innovation

- Engage resources outside the enterprise

- They can see solutions you can’t

- You can see problems they can’t

- The “voice of the customer” !

- Provide suitable capabilities

- Abstract your business – loose coupling no longer optional

- Simplify to reflect the customers view

- Prioritise key business functions

- Stop saying “No!” to Marketing

- Be easy to work with


Solution Needs

• Flexibility

– Solution must match the enterprise

– Solution must match the partners

– Solution must evolve as maturity evolves

• Access

– Solution must encompass all relevant stakeholders

• End to End Solution

– API Management integrated with SDLC

– Run time enforces policies determined by architecture and enterprise

strategy

– Run time monitors usage


Matching PartnerNeeds


Matching the Partner Needs

• Flexibility

– Move fast to meet emerging technical trends

– Present different interfaces to different partner types

– Provide the right support infrastructure

• Access

– Make it easy for them to discover what you have

– Make it easy to get help

– Allow and promote collaboration

• End to End Solution

– What does this mean to you ? Onboarding ? App approval ? API

promotion ?


Managing Entitlements

Quality

Of Service

EULA

Scopes

Licence Terms

Operations

API

Scopes & Policies

Licence


Content Filtering

• Provide a content firewall,

protecting against malicious

content

• Validate message content

including message headers,

form and query parameters,

XML and JSON data

structures.

• Policies for XML and JSON

DoS

• Protection against viruses in

attachments and other binary

content via ICAP integration

with leading anti-virus

engines


Quota Management/Rate Limiting

Restrict the number of calls an App can make

Apply controls based on context, affinity, segmentation etc.


Mediation

• Reuse existing assets and services to create modern APIs that meet

consumer requirements

• Transport Mediation

– http, https, JMS

• Binding Mediation

– REST to and from SOAP

– SOAP versions

• Content Mediation

– XML to and from JSON

– Transformation

• Policy Mediation

– Security Token exchange

– WS-Policy interoperability


Analytics


Deploy a Gateway or Deploy a Proxy ?

Lightweight container

for API facade

Gateway fulfills additional

roles in the architecture


Routing & Flow Control


The Need for Speed …

Systems of Innovation

Systems of Differentiation

Systems of RecordSpeed !

Speed !!

Speed !!!


On boarding


Caring for the Community

• Provide a social developer engagement platform

• Integrate API documentation

• Automate App access provisioning

• Integrated discussion and newsfeeds

• Trouble ticket management

• Search with full content indexing

• API and App privacy and group management – essential for B2B and partner APIs


Developer Engagement


But what does the enterprise need ?

• Access for API Owners

– Who controls the docs ?

– Who controls access ?

• What needs to be approved ?

– API access ?

– Developer id ? Organsiation id ?

• Who needs to approve it ?

– One owner ?

– A workflow across a group of stakeholders ?


Best practice or your practice ?

New measures, new roles

External

scout ?

Internal Idea

Broker ?

Internal

Venture

Capitalist ?

Number

of ideas ?

Proportion of

good ideas ?

Value from

shared ideas ?

Successful

conversion ?


So ….

• Provide the infrastructure that suits your business model

• Match your internal governance needs

Then the fun part …


So ….

• Provide the infrastructure that suits your business model

• Match your internal governance needs

- Allow innovation – Promote innovation – Support innovation

- Expect the unexpected – flexibility and security

- Measure benefit and retain imagination

Then the fun part …


Questions

building a business-facing mobile developer community

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