How the public sector can benefit from APIs
Author: Yves Vanderbeken
Imagine being able to request a government service — say, getting access to the right healthcare provider — as quickly and easily as booking a ride with Uber or buying a book from Amazon.
That’s what today’s citizens increasingly expect. Accustomed to fast and easy online transactions for banking and shopping, they expect similarly fast and easy service for their government services.
However, providing this kind of easy and quick service online is often a challenge. The software that manages government services often runs on legacy computer hardware. Many of these systems, perhaps decades old, were built long before the advent of the web, cloud computing and mobile phones.
Fortunately, government agencies can use a more modern approach today: application programming interfaces. Better known as APIs, these are computing interfaces that essentially act like keys, unlocking legacy software code and functionality. Governments can use APIs now to make their services available to other agencies, citizen developers and even tech-savvy startups.
Making legacy modern
Most government legacy systems follow their own release cycles. We’re probably not going to change that anytime soon. But we can enable certain parts of that functionality and open them up with APIs to the outside ecosystem.
By making the functionality of legacy systems open and available to others, APIs are a powerful way of unlocking that functionality and letting others be creative with modern technology.
For example, with this one change, other agencies, citizen developer and startup partners can book an inspection, request an education history (under the right security and privacy conditions, of course), or write a new app that uses the API to process a subsidy or grant.
No need to wait
Once a public-sector agency opens its functionality with APIs, it can then also start to think about replacing it with more modern systems at the back end. But ultimately, these two tasks will need to be separated. There’s no point in waiting 20 years to modernize a mainframe or legacy application when APIs are available to you today.
A great example of this can be found in Antwerp. The Belgian city is home to more than 350 startups and 11 business incubators. Now it’s working with a local R&D hub, IMEC, to build an intricate network of smart sensors and wireless gateways, creating what’s being called the City of Things.
Antwerp has also launched a “buy from startups” program. This includes a new, streamlined procurement process that replaces RFPs with challenges and pitch sessions. In this way, the city essentially only needs to ensure that startups can connect to its IT back end safely and securely. Then the city can step back and let startups do the modernization.
With APIs, government agencies can act more like startups, in part by working with actual startups themselves.
About the author
Yves Vanderbeken is DXC Technology’s chief technologist in Belgium. Yves focuses on delivering innovative approaches to digital services transformation, deriving public and business value from data, and helping governments at all levels realize benefits from consolidated platforms and shared services in the drive toward Everything as a Service.