Page 29 - FCW, June 2017

won’t, then you will opt not to design the system to share information easily via APIs.
The latter choice will save you some costs in development and project man- agement in the short term, but it will constrain you in the long term. The former choice will create some minor additional costs initially but provide you with significant flexibility in the future.
The bigger point is that this is a choice — an architectural choice about the structure of the IT systems we build. Making the right decision requires intentionality and foresight. It does not happen easily or automatically. Indeed, many companies are not good at doing it, so this is not a case of the public sector simply not getting it.
There is a marvelous story about how Amazon CEO Jeff
out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. 3. There will be no other form
of inter-process communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back- doors whatsoever. The only com- munication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4. It doesn’t matter what technology
of what made it possible for Amazon to scale and serve as a global platform for retail.
Was it painful? Was it hard? Absolute- ly. But it enabled the organization to offer both scale and innovation in a manner few others have been able to replicate — all because of an architectural choice. If you think that government should be able to operate with the scale and flex- ibility of Amazon, then Bezos’ mandate and its implications for government are worth studying more closely.
And this brings us back to systems integrators — because after the man- date, anyone designing a new system at Amazon would know the system should be designed from the outset to talk to other systems. Hiring a systems integra- tor would be an admission that you had
Bezos recognized the
need for interoperabili-
ty in the early 2000s and
forced his organization
to move from siloed
entities that required
systems integrators —
sometimes the system
in question was simply
two people emailing
data back and forth to one another, and sometimes it was a lot more — to an environment that was extensible and API-powered.
Steve Yegge, a former Amazon employee who now works at Google, accidentally “ranted” about it back in 2011 in a piece that is so good I reread it every six to 12 months.
The article’s key point is that the ultimate systems architect — Ama- zon’s CEO — decided there was a good architecture available because of APIs. As Yegge describes it:
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rub- ber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion — back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year — he issued a mandate that was so
architected your IT systems poorly and would be seen as a waste of company time and money.
This is the view the government should take. We should be building systems with the idea of sharing data
and services by design, not as some- thing systems integrators must create later.
Now if you are a systems integra- tor and you’re reading this, have no fear. There are, happily, thousands (and more likely tens of thousands) of legacy government systems out there that will require your services so that they can be integrated with others’ sys- tems in the coming years and decades. There will still be plenty of money to be made. However, no new system being built by the government should require a systems integrator. It should adhere to Bezos mandate No. 1. n
David Eaves is an author and a lec- turer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He contributes regularly to Steve Kelman’s “The Lec- tern” blog on FCW.com.
IF FROMTHE OUTSET OF ANY PROJECTYOU ACCEPTTHATYOUR SYSTEMWILL NEEDTOTALKTO OTHER SYSTEMS,YOUWILL DESIGN IT SOTHAT DATA AND INFORMATION CAN BE ACCESSED VIA API.
they use. HTTP, CORBA, PubSub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.
5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
It is hard to describe how difficult and far-reaching this mandate was, but its impact and vision cannot be under- stated. Bezos effectively forced Ama- zon’s disparate systems to work togeth- er and to serve as platforms for further innovation and integration. It represents one of the most dramatic shifts from a siloed organizational structure to a networked structure. It is a key part
June 2017 FCW.COM 23