Application programme interfaces (APIs) are becoming an increasingly important element in the transformation and evolution of public sector digital services.
A survey of UKAuthority readers has found that 87% are actively working with APIs, specifically to optimise the citizen experience (75%), integrate legacy systems with new forward facing services (73%) and pull holistic services together around the citizen (71%).
They are seeing the benefits of enabling different systems and applications to talk to each other, and that APIs can provide a crucial part of the ‘plumbing’ for the delivery of cross-agency services.
But there are also significant obstacles in the way, around capacity, organisational cultures and the business relationships with suppliers of legacy IT systems - a lot of work has yet to be done to realise the promise of APIs.
UKAuthority has carried out an in-depth investigation of the issue, supported by Cognizant, the details of which are available in a white paper, APIs for the public good. It provides a series of insights and ideas on how public authorities can face up to the problems and begin to develop an effective API strategy to help build the next generation of digital citizen services.
You can download the paper here.
Image from iStock
