This panel was moderated by John Dages, Technology Solution Director at Fusion Alliance (left) and features Ryan Shondell, Executive Director of Data Services at OCLC (center) and Jeremy King Chief Enterprise Architect at NetJets (right).
Good technology executives know that good directives must be followed up with action plans that create value. So how do you get the business on board with an API-first strategy? How do you enhance API adoption at the enterprise level?
Solve an actual problem.
Think of a legitimate felt need within a service or a function in your span of control and use microservices, headless, cloud-native, or composable functions to handle it. Buzzwords don’t drive API adoption. Follow-through does. Show the business how an API-first strategy makes their job easier.
The average business user doesn’t care about fancy architecture. They don’t care if you use microservices, make something headless, or are running a composable enterprise unless it makes a difference in their day-to-day. They want the website to be faster or to have more capabilities so they can drive their own KPIs.
So how do you drive API adoption when your business users are thoroughly tech agnostic? You build change management into your roadmap and win hearts and minds with results. When it comes to getting the business on board for API-first initiatives, the only way to build trust is demonstrable progress.
About our panelists:
Ryan Shondell is currently the Executive Director of Data Services at OCLC, responsible for developing and executing the company’s data strategy and aligned technology. This includes technical product management, data operations, data quality, and development of AI/ML capabilities, analytics, search, and all customer-facing data applications and APIs across a staff of 300. Prior to joining OCLC, Ryan held multiple senior engineering leadership positions at VMware going back to 2010, most recently as Senior Director of Engineering, where he helped to lead global development on products like Skyline and VMware Cloud. And now, he’s actually headed to Path Robotics to start his next adventure.
Jeremy King has been working in Technology for over 20 years and is currently the Chief Enterprise Architect at NetJets. He started his career designing and developing embedded systems and has worked in many industries including banking, health care, travel and transportation, and integration tools. His background includes distributed cloud-native architecture, data structures and modeling, enterprise integration patterns, event-driven architectures, and API design. As a Software Architect, Jeremy has faced the challenge of making disparate systems exchange data in consistent, performant ways. His current passions include technical innovation, graph databases, and emerging API standards.
