Part 4: The future is open: Create your digital destiny

Who should read this guide?

• Chief Digital & Innovation Officers 

• Heads of Product & eCommerce 

• Partner & Alliances Leaders 

• Customer Experience Leaders 

• API Product Managers 

• Marketing Leaders

Banking • Healthcare
Insurance • Manufacturing
Transportation & Logistics
Retail • Pharma

In 2020, businesses that hadn’t yet undergone a digital transformation were caught off guard. COVID-19 changed the world and exposed weaknesses. But it also revealed resilience and helped organizations focus on building the connections that really matter.

In 2021, those that understand the importance of reorienting the business with an open platform will be well positioned for future digital success.

Welcome to the Digital Transformation Survival Guide

If you’re like a lot of business decision-makers, 2020 was a crash course in digital transformation. Given only about eight weeks to do what typically takes five years, no one got everything right. The key now is to take a deep breath and make sure you’re building the right strategy and prioritizing the right products, projects, and programs for 2021 and beyond. 

If you’re looking for answers about how to eliminate data silos and move your digital projects forward, you’ve come to the right place. This Guide explains how an open platform provides the strategy and capabilities you will need to face new (and urgent) business challenges, to grow, and to evolve your organization and your operations so you’re stronger than ever before.

It’s divided into four parts, each designed to guide you further along the path to long-term digital success.

Part 1: Embrace the challenges

Reconfiguring your business for the future isn’t a small thing. Learn about the challenges you’ll face and how an open platform can help you address them.

Part 2: Appraise yourself honestly

Knowing where you’re starting from is the only way you can move forward. Assess your organization’s level of digital maturity and get guidance on what to do next.

Part 3: Explore the possibilities of an open digital model

Learn how an open platform can help you reach new customers, experiment with new business models, and create new products and services faster at lower cost.

Part 4: The future is open – create your digital destiny

Prepare to take the next steps with an open platform to unlock existing digital assets and create new business value.

The future is open: create your digital destiny

The goal of an open platform is to unlock existing digital assets to create new business value for your customers, partners, employees, and developer communities. In a complex infrastructure of components, data, teams, tools, and processes, it will be a challenge. But the results will be worth it.

As we discussed in Part 3 of this guide, there are many ways an open platform enables you to create your own digital destiny by leveraging and modernizing your existing IT infrastructure. In essence, it makes it possible to use what you have to invent what you need.

• Build. Your platform can allow internal teams and external partners to build on your existing business processes and IT infrastructure. Creating APIs and enabling components in an open platform approach reduces friction and makes it possible to quickly create new products and services using your business assets as the key ingredients.

• Co-create. An open platform allows others to participate and co-create the value they need. Your users become your ambassadors, demonstrating how to use your platform to innovate and selling their products and services in your ecosystem — all of which contributes to your revenue share.

• Evolve. APIs will generate new value flows across your ecosystem. Drawing on API usage data to gain market insights, you can continue to evolve to meet the needs of your users and create new digital business models in the era of COVID-19 and beyond.

Be prepared. Five steps to get started.

An open platform approach will help you integrate, orchestrate, and govern all the digital components needed for your future success. Here are five steps that will help you get started.

1. Align goals and technology. Identify your key business goals and which technologies in your stack will help you reach them. How will you measure success?

2. Put APIs first. Ensure there is a common organizational understanding that APIs are the key to unlocking the value in your systems and creating new digital value chains. 

3. Avoid bottlenecks. You don’t have to tackle a big project to start making progress. Break goals down into manageable units and treat each as a product plan – not just another software project. 

4. Design for your users. For each product or service you are building, always focus on the value it should bring to the user — employee, partner, developer, or end customer. 

5. Foster an innovative culture. With an open platform as the cornerstone of how your organization creates value, everyone in your organization can contribute to innovation.

Need help?

Schedule a Strategy Workshop that brings your business, operations, digital, and technical stakeholders together to align your API program with larger business goals.

After assessing your current situation, the Catalysts will help you build a strategy and a plan for reaching the next stage of your journey while avoiding time-consuming and expensive pitfalls along the way.

Learn More

Catalysts Powered by Axway

• Align investments with predictable, measurable outcomes 

• Maximize team buy-in and innovation 

• Plan disruption vs. experience it

Monetizing APIs through autonomous innovation all over the world

Case study: BNP Paribas Personal Finance

BNP Paribas Personal Finance has built systems and processes that give country groups and lines of business the autonomy to select the technology stack that makes sense for their specific innovation goals. They did it by aligning more than 30 global lines of business, an extensive network of partners, and infrastructure assets including multiple API gateways, API programs, vendor products, and hybrid clouds to create a single view of APIs.

They then progressed to the next stage of their evolution: monetizing the digital infrastructure by creating business models for the API products. “By giving our 30 global businesses control over their own API platforms and strategies, we have had great success in driving adoption of the API First vision — but the approach presented some challenges when it came to monetization,” explains Jérémy Ségura, Enterprise Architect at BNP Paribas Personal Finance.

The answer? A unified catalog that allows the company to easily identify overlapping and duplicated functionality and standardize on the most efficient APIs for each use case, wherever they are needed in the world. And there’s another benefit that CISOs, CTOs, and CEOs can appreciate. According to Ségura, “A single view of all our APIs will also be extremely valuable from the data governance and information security perspective and help us to encourage the adoption of corporate standards and best practices.” 

A single view of all our APIs will also be extremely valuable from the data governance and information security perspective and help us to encourage the

adoption of corporate standards and best practices.

–Jérémy Ségura, Enterprise Architect,
BNP Paribas Personal Finance

Read the Case Study

Amplify — an open approach to API management

Amplify API Management Platform turns the systems you already have into brilliant customer experiences. It gives business teams a central place to access, use, and manage all their APIs and API integrations — without having to wait for IT. This means you can modernize your technology stack without being overly prescriptive or slowing down your innovation potential.

The Amplify platform acts as a central control plane for all your API assets, regardless of how they’re developed and deployed. It gathers all internal and external APIs into a unified catalog where they can be discovered, managed, and monitored. It brings lines of business, partners, and developer communities together to collaborate and co-create, and rapidly build new products, business models, and ecosystems. And it opens a clear path to the digital business outcomes you’re looking for.

Be bold. Start now.

There is no doubt that digital transformation is a challenge. It’s also clear that, in today’s environment, there is no other choice. An open platform is a prerequisite for success. But great technology is just the beginning. For Axway, helping our customers automate, adapt, innovate, and grow is the only metric that counts. 

The future is wide open. It’s time to be bold. The time to start is now

What’s Next?

• Take the Digital Maturity Assessment

• Learn about the Amplify platform

• Schedule 30 minutes with an expert