Emerging Perspectives of API Strategy [Unedited]

Software specialists increasingly find themselves in situations where their API-related decisions have strong implications on software business. Through long-lasting research collaboration with API-responsible software specialists and several large software-intensive companies, we have established a strategic API framework to aid in consideration of business concerns when designing, updating, or maintaining APIs. We provide the following actionable insights in this article: 1) our framework combines multiple layers and perspectives that provided value for our partners in their in API design, 2) the framework helps API designers to better organize their design decisions amongst various business and technical concerns and 3) the framework supports development of holistic API strategies, as it supports: APIs as objects of digital innovation, allowing to derive important boundary objects; BAPO perspective on API development; and consideration of API governance. We use anonymized examples from our partners to illustrate the application of the framework.