Chapter "API Governance" from API Management - Part I (Category Management)

I already did. sammari This is a great book, "API Management," but today I wanted to briefly talk about the chapter on governance, which I've been reading a lot of flashbacks:) The main thoughts that I got for myself about such

1. Not everyone likes the word “governance,” so sometimes it’s best not to use it, but the authors say that it’s a good word to use.

In fact, we’ll go as far as saying that it’s impossible to manage your APIs without governing them. Therefore, a particular approach to governance exists and the authors offer a model for a meaningful choice of approach.

2. These elements of the governance system are: decisions, management, complexity
3. Engineering involves a large number of decisions, and some decisions affect how the business will feel in the future.
4. A large company may need to make a lot of decisions in a limited amount of time, and governance should help organize the decision-making process so that they are of high quality.
5. Governance processes are expensive, but the good news is that you don’t have to control every decision you make in an organization, and the bad news is that you have to decide what to control to get good results.
6. Here comes complexity, or rather, what we work with. complex adaptive systemWhich have the following interesting properties

• They have many interdependent parts. (people, technologies, processes, culture,) These parts change their behavior dynamically and adapt to change. n (For example, changes in infrastructure technologies lead to changes in deployment practices.)

7. People adapt well to change, unlike our existing software, and they are able to make locally optimal decisions, from which a large system grows over time.
8. If we want to influence people's behavior and decision-making in the right direction, then we can not cut off from the shoulder and this is what the authors of the book recommend to do.

A big, up-front plan and execution approach to API governance is unlikely to work. Instead, you’ll need to “nudge” the system by making smaller changes and assessing their impact. It requires an approach of continuous adjustment and improvement, in the same way you might tend to a garden, pruning branches, planting seeds, and watering while continuously observing and adjusting your approach.

9. For effective decision-making management, three questions must be answered.

• What decisions should be managed? Who and where should make these decisions? How this decision-making strategy will affect CAS (complex adaptive systems)

10. There is. 2 Conceptual decision-making: centralized and decentralized. They are most easily viewed through the prism of three factors. Accessibility and accuracy of information for decision-making

• Talent for decision-making Cost of coordination

11. Other important aspects to consider are scope and scale.

• Scope of optimization - conditionally, with decentralized decision-making, locally optimal decisions can be made and everything will look fashionable and innovative. But if you take into account only the local scope, then the entire system of decisions can be negatively affected - friendly these individual decisions at the level of the whole company will be very difficult. Scale of operations is about the number of decisions you need to make. Conventionally, if you need to make complex decisions, it is difficult to provide all decentralized teams with professionals who will be able to take them. Centralization of decision-making will lead the central group into a bottleneck.

It would seem that we are at a dead end, but it turns out that you can take a divide and conquer approach and organize the governance process through a mix of centralized and decentralized approaches, but more about this in the next post.

#Architecture #Software #Governance #Management #Leadership #Processes #Leadership