Getting Into the Kitchen with APIs

What is the difference between your home kitchen and a restaurant?

If you are an experienced cook, your kitchen may be a more inviting place—a laboratory for experimentation and creativity. If you are a busy type, restaurants may seem like a reliable short-cut, saving time and energy. For the social, restaurants do much of the heavy-lifting that makes hosting such a challenge, allowing you to focus on guests and entertainment.

In the world of data-sharing, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are a bit like restaurants—more specifically, the wait staff.

You can certainly get a lot done on your own, in your home kitchen, but restaurants add a certain scale, efficiency, and ease to the process of turning raw ingredients—your data—into enjoyable meals. Bridging the kitchen with the diner is the front of house staff—waiters and waitresses. They are the API of the restaurant.

Like APIs, they help you make sense of the menu—the various products, services, and data you can get from the restaurant—and then relay your request back to the kitchen. When prepared, they then return the finished meal to you. APIs are what make it possible for you to aggregate search results from various airlines, and determine the lowest airfare available. They allow you to manage your various email accounts from a single dashboard, or monitor your social media profiles for activity engagement.

Unstructured data—or data siloed within proprietary systems of storage and management—are like raw ingredients. Somewhere between them is a meal, but they need the filter of a restaurant to arrangement them in a usable, shareable manner. APIs help connect your appetite to the restaurant that can provide whatever you are craving.

APIs are currently a key component missing from the emerging Internet of Things (IoT).

APIs are like waiters in a restaurant

Consider the status of wearables

For now, early adopters are more or less on their own to make sense of the various proprietary apps that collect and store their wearables data, for example. Unless particularly skilled with Excel (and infinitely patient), it is hard to get this data into a usable format that can then be shared with anyone—like, say, the doctors whose expertise might turn all this data into the basis for actionable health advice.

And absent an open API for their electronic health records (EHRs), doctors have no means by which to incorporate any data generated outside the clinical setting into a person’s records. That means you may delight in monitoring your blood pressure or glucose levels throughout the week, but only the ones your doctor takes during a check-up are a matter of record—or of interest to your insurers.

 Just as everybody eats, everybody—at some point or other—needs healthcare services. Right now, all the rich, valuable data detailing individuals’ health exists in silos. Opening up health data APIs are the key to making that data social—shareable, digestible, personal, and interactive.

“Open” is a critical feature to making APIs really work. When a company like Facebook opens up its APIs, it enables developers to create more apps that can interact with Facebook—and the social data is contains—in different ways. To continue the restaurant example, it is a bit like adding a drive-thru or taking orders by phone and online: more people can get what they want in more ways.

While this opening of access seems like an obvious win for a restaurant, it is even more lucrative for major companies like Google and Facebook—though perhaps for less obvious reasons.

Letting developers create more ways for users to access the proprietary information ultimately gives users more ways to rely on that company to provide the core data that makes apps useful. Think about Apple’s App Store, and how it created a platform for independent developers to add functionality to a single device. They still need that device to take full advantage, but no longer have to wait for Apple to come out with its own version of every app, targeted toward every specific task they can think of.

In the healthcare world, EHR platforms are still largely operating like smartphones without an app store. Regulators and providers are working on a solution, but until a set of API standards can be agreed upon, health data is effectively the Wild West.

The need for standards is not just about function, but about balancing ease-of-use with respect for privacy. While waiters will take orders from anyone who comes to their restaurant, APIs look for users with the correct key before they return the requested service. Data security is a critical challenge for anyone looking to bring Big Data into the operational realm. In the healthcare realm, security and API integrity presents a larger hurdle than in other industries.

In the internet age, making data interactive and social is a key selling point for products, services, brands, and platforms. The apps that connect people with their tools are the basis for many of the “unicorn” companies that littered the startup landscape of 2015—companies whose premise showed enough promise that valuations shot over the billion-dollar mark.

The value–and function–that people have come to expect in all industries is powered by APIs. Without them, the kitchen and the hungry diner never connect.

from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1RadZij via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1PoT31g