Require that every API considered for adoption be run through a documented procurement evaluation checklist before a team commits to it. I want the same questions asked each time, covering security, licensing, reliability, support, pricing, and exit, so that adoption decisions rest on evidence rather than a demo and a good feeling. A shared checklist makes evaluations comparable across candidates and defensible to the people who sign off on the spend. Skipping this step is how organizations accumulate risky, redundant dependencies, so I hold a consistent evaluation checklist as a requirement at discovery time.
Procurement Evaluation Checklist
Strategies
APIs Are Evaluated Before Adoption
I want us to evaluate an API before we build on it, because the cheapest time to discover a bad dependency is before it is wired into production. That means running third-party APIs through a procu...
Experiences
Procurement
Procurement is the experience of evaluating and adopting an API before building on it. Whether the API comes from another team or a third-party vendor, someone has to weigh its quality, reliability...
Quality
The quality of HTTP APIs powering an enterprise tends to decline as the number of ungoverned APIs grows across internal, partner, and public landscapes. Low-quality APIs lead to poor downstream exp...
Governance
Governance is the experience of keeping API operations consistent and aligned as they scale across teams and time. It is the discipline that connects strategy at the top to the rules being enforced...
Lifecycle
travel_explore Discovery Production
Discovery is how APIs get found and reused instead of rebuilt. APIs.json, catalogs, and search make the APIs I operate visible to the people who need them. Good discovery is what turns a pile of AP...
