I’m often asked about the efficacy of APIs in Human eXperience Management. Here’s my take on it.
HXM is all about employee enablement and democracy. Employees having access to data and processes that they never had or imagined earlier. HXM is enabled by digital transformation.
Digital transformation, especially in the WorkTech space, is all about making processes and information access simple and effective. Making applications and processes accessible can hardly be done with archaic HR systems. As companies lean in on modern web based cloud applications to drive value, HR processes get fragmented. Hire, experience and manage employees on the cloud system, continue paying and keeping time in the legacy system is good example for a process that’s fragmented across two systems.
A fragmented process is an integration challenge. Hybrid process integration needs modern Integration platforms – read IPaaS/ middleware. IPaaS, an acronym for Integration Platform as a Service, is used securely read data from the source, transform and load the same to a destination system – irrespective of where the system is located.
The IPaaS needs a way, a contrivance to access data in a secure, reliable and functionally complete sense. API, HTTP based ReSTful Application Programming Interface, is that go-to contrivance. Without the request/response pattern of the ReST APIs there’s no easier way to have an effective, nearly seamless, process integration between two systems.
To conclude, APIs are at the root of it all. What do you all think? Curious to know!
