Business Events: Need for API Developer Portal kinda one to improve visibility

API platform played a substantial role in enabling self-service integration to a great extent. It has simplified concerns like edge security concerns, message transformations, orchestrations, throttling, monetization, and others in a significant way. For me, discoverability of API through developer portal is a key feature I like the most because of simplicity in approach and at the same time powerful. Why is it powerful? One can look at APIs available for consumption at centralized portal …not only that APIs are fully documented regarding its intent, URI, Request/Response structure plus other relevant attributes. Traditionally its pain to reuse existing business capabilities in a large enterprise as that information regarding real time interfaces were hidden within siloed teams and then discovering and getting service endpoint provisioned for consumption was a pain. Now API platform has simplified it in a significant way. 

I would strongly recommend extending the same model to Business Events also. I am strong proponent of Business Event as the first-class citizen and should be treated in that manner. 

I want to quote from my article published in 2013 here. “Real Time Enterprise is the need of the hour in the fast-changing world. The primary attribute of such an enterprise is the ability to act on the key business event as quickly and effectively as possible. As the latency of action increases, the ability to derive value out of it will decrease substantially and yielding not much value. These types of business events could be deduced by analyzing & correlating the events emanating from business processes/applications. It could be fed back into the business processes to make it more intelligent and context driven. “. 

Good percentage of enterprises has failed to leverage the business event effectively. There are plethora of reasons for the same. First of all, the failure to identify business events and then creating & publishing the right semantics in terms of event message structure & its version management is one of the primary reasons. But I want to stress upon lack of having centralized infrastructure which helps to discover business events & associated semantics is another major factor. In this context, it would be better to have centralized developer portal  (like API Developer Portal) which provide details about Business Events published by applications within business capability , its message structures, end-points from which it could be subscribed. This visibility greatly promotes effective use of business events in a great way