Shad Imam, director of solution engineering for federal region at MuleSoft, told Rob Stein, senior vice president for North America public sector at Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), in an interview how government agencies can accelerate the delivery of services and improved experiences to citizens using application programming interfaces.
Imam cited some of the challenges facing government agencies, such as shrinking information technology budgets, the growing number of information silos in legacy systems and increasing pressure to innovate faster, and how APIs could help address such issues.
He noted APIs could help agencies establish connection among data sources, devices and applications.
“APIs are quickly becoming core building blocks for digital transformation because they make systems easy to access and allow data to be decoupled from complex underlying systems,” Imam said. “As a result, developers are free to code what customers want and innovate faster.”
Imam called on agency IT teams to “realize their potential as business leaders” and reassess their roles from legacy software experts.
“By implementing an API-led approach to integration, broader teams can reuse APIs instead of writing custom integration code with every project. This in turn facilitates greater collaboration within the agency and enables other agencies to tap into their resources and capabilities,” he added.
Imam also mentioned the capabilities of MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform and how the company works to help Integration Trailblazers understand how they use and reuse APIs in their projects through technical training programs.
