Cofounder and CEO of Nylas.
The past year has been full of business challenges, layoffs and budget cuts as we may be heading into a recession. While companies continue to think about the ways they can cut costs, business leaders have an opportunity to dive deep into their business and operations and identify the root causes that lead to inefficiencies and overspending.
Often, business leaders focus only on where and how they can cut costs. But the problem with that strategy is that it’s solely a quick fix to a larger problem. In order to cut costs in a meaningful way that can have a long-term positive impact, leaders must look at three core problems impacting their workforce: context switching, disparate data and accumulated technical debt.
While there are many ways to fix those three areas based on legacy systems, another way to explore solving them is by using APIs to enhance the developer experience.
Reducing Context Switching
Context switching can be described as constant moving back and forth from one task to another. While it may seem like it does not impact an employee’s day much, it has time-consuming repercussions on tasks and overall business. One way to help resolve context switching is to consolidate the number of tools that an employee must use on a daily basis. However, tool consolidation might not work across multiple teams and can be a lengthy audit and process. Instead, leaders should consider a more technical approach to reduce context switching.
APIs are helpful in reducing context switching because they connect platforms within each other making processes more intuitive. For example, if you are looking to book a meeting on someone’s calendar, it’s much more time-consuming to go into your calendar and look for availability. Consider the time it takes recruiters to schedule interviews between candidates and multiple internal stakeholders costs businesses in the U.S. $1.85 billion per week. With something like an email API or calendar API, what you are looking for is in the same place, and doesn’t take you out of the system you are in and take you out of the task at hand.
Avoid Disparate Data
Similar to how APIs can help streamline workflows to enable less context switching, they can also help when it comes to data. Developers can be deployed to automate data entry and maintenance, which removes lift from doing it themselves. Additionally, having cohesive data fosters higher productivity and better collaboration because your developers are working off the same data set.
Further, automating manual processes can improve overall experiences for developers and for customers. Being able to harness real-time cohesive data can significantly shorten the time needed to complete tasks while ensuring that you have the best data possible at your fingertips to reduce bugs and the need to go back and redo completed work.
Eliminate Technical Debt
Software is evolving quickly and should continue to evolve at an even faster rate in 2023 and beyond. As a result, many companies find themselves running on outdated legacy systems.
Traditionally, companies have simply layered modern tools and applications on top of their existing legacy systems; however, this has backfired, causing complicated processes, significant downtime and even opening them up to greater security risks. Simply put, legacy systems are likely no longer the most effective way for developers to complete tasks. With APIs, companies can reduce technical debt by significantly reducing their internal costs and modernizing their tech stack.
Conclusion
When assessing whether or not to implement APIs as a way to solve for increasing technical debt, one key area that leaders should look at is the costs and time that will go into maintaining and updating your systems. While implementing APIs may require some additional work on the front end, they can save time and resources in the long run by handling any ongoing maintenance or security updates while helping to ensure that future development needs will not be slowed down due to stagnant or outdated systems.
While the benefits of APIs are clear, implementing APIs is not free of challenges. One of the more common challenges is ensuring the safety and security of sensitive customer data. It is important that organizations not only implement strict privacy and security standards by adhering to regional and global security certifications and privacy laws but also understand the security protocols of the API platforms and systems. Protecting data at rest is half of the battle; the other half is ensuring your data is secure while in transit, both within your own systems and especially when using third-party tools.
Major companies that rely on older systems had a huge awakening in Covid-19, and it pushed digital transformation forward. Now, there is an opportunity to implement even more modern tech through APIs so that systems run safely, smoothly and cost-effectively.
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