How to choose a digital agency to ensure you don’t get the API economy wrong
How to choose a digital agency… it’s one of the most asked questions and for good reason too: as we’ve said before, not all advertising agencies are created equal. As you can imagine, when it comes to ensuring you utilise the API economy in a fashion that suits your organisation’s needs, working alongside the right digital agency is all the more important. How to choose? That’s the million dollar question but hopefully, we’ll shed some light below.
Before we go further, if your eyes stumbled on the term API economy, be sure to read this post that outlines exactly what you need to know about the API economy. If you’ve got a solid grasp as to what the API economy actually is, our experience tells us that often, businesses will start an integration project with two major systems in their business. Inevitably, this sees them diving way too low pretty quickly.
So why are so many businesses yearning to learn more about integration? There are numerous reasons, including:
- You end up with two of the best breed of systems interacting together and talking to one another.
- A legacy system can be integrated into a new system such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
As you can imagine, after so many years in business here at Pronto Woven, we’ve heard how dissatisfied organisations (and especially marketing professionals) are with a particular digital agency, way too many times for our liking. In the past, we’ve seen some really alarming things such as organisations jumping into SDK, starting to map fields and so on. Before you start engaging in these kinds of activities, you need to take a step back and truly understand your business’ processes. We can’t overstate this enough.
We hear what you’re thinking right about now: well, that’s fair enough but what things do we need to be thinking about? Here are a good set of questions to get you started:
- Who are the users of each system? What information will they need and what are their skill levels? How do they use the systems to solve their business needs?
- What allows for the best business workflow? You need to take into account what will make sense for the users and what needs to be in place in order to increase organisational efficiency.
- Where is the best place to maintain the data on-hand and in-turn, who will be responsible for the master data-set?
- How do you want to handle any exceptions (and there will be)? Will exceptions be bounced by the receiving system or stored for manual correction at a later point in time?
- Are real time responses critical for this business’ processes?
- What volatility levels are at play at either end in terms of changing the way the APIs work or in relation to data changing?
- What should the system do if the gateway between the two systems is down?
- Is there a recovery strategy if one of the systems needs to be restored for some reason?
Answering the above questions is vital to building the correct API economy for your needs. Additionally, you need to understand the relationship that exists between the two systems. More questions come into play here: do you have access to people that can change the system at either end? Can you influence one side of these ends? Do you have no control over either, meaning you have to work within the current system limitations?
We understand how thinking about the above, while also contemplating how to choose a digital agency, can be overwhelming. At the end of the day, you should be thinking about engaging an integration solutions team who can act as your partners and as your single go to point.
Want to talk to a digital agency capable of providing an entire end-to-end solution? The team at Pronto Woven is here to help - contact us for an obligation free meeting. This is where we’ll spend some time understanding your organisation’s goals and the complexity of your business.
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