Your Workplace needs an API

In retrospect, March 14 2006 was a seminal turning point in the tech industry and the global economy as a whole. This was the day Amazon announced the availability of S3 – one of the first offerings under Amazon Web Services, (a division that already existed but was not well-known

S3 provided data storage on-demand, from anywhere. It caught the entire world off guard. It sounded like a simple service, a curiosity, or an experiment, but it ended up spawning entirely new industries and markets. What made it disruptive was that everything around it was available (and at that time, *only available*) through an API.

The implications were enormous. Previously you would have had to go to multiple enterprises IT companies and get quotes, pre-spec out your requirements and pay a hefty amount upfront. Now, you just had to call an API to store data, and another API to retrieve it. You would only pay for what you used, and you would be given ‘multiple 9s’ of availability. No upfront fees. No support charges. No salesman in the middle who had to earn his commission. You could bake the feature right into your own applications, products or internal business workflows.

Amazon had spare capacity of disk and compute resources, and the infrastructure to maintain it. They could have gone the traditional route to leverage it but they decided to build an API instead.

AWS is the ultimate digital transformation success story.

API Integration enables Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation isn’t about digitizing your asset information and being able to access them from a mobile phone. It’s about enabling new business models through the speed and agility that comes from making your data and services digital.

To really push the boundary, your services should be automatable and should be consumable in as many ways as possible.

In other words, you need to have an API.

Your workplace doesn’t have to be a cost center. You can enable innovative new business models and user experiences by taking the advantage of what you already have.

You need some basic ingredients to make this possible,

1. You need to be able to connect to the various systems and applications you already have.

If you have spare room capacity, your room booking system can tell you that.
Your comfort sensors can give you immediate feedback on working conditions and air quality. Your energy meters can give you an instant snapshot of sustainability and green metrics.

2. You need to be able to pull all of that into one place.

The next step is to easily integrate them. By themselves, the data is useful. But when you integrate them, you can enable more informed decision-making and unlock insights.

Correlating calendar bookings with actual occupancy data, for instance, gives you clearer insights into staff behaviour that tenant FM and workplace management teams would love to have.

3. And the final step is to make all of this easily available through an API.

Once you have this in place, you will have unlocked an abundance of new capabilities and experiences.

In the example we took above, these new capabilities include:

• Reduction of no-shows for meetings.
• Ability to guarantee optimum comfort levels and have data to back it.
• Ability to allow on-demand booking of spare inventory.

That’s just the obvious outcomes. There’s a lot more hidden underneath the surface.

Give your customers an inch and they will take you a mile.