It is five years since UKAuthority and Cognizant first partnered to research the outlook for application programming interfaces (APIs) – elements of software code to enable data sharing – in the UK public sector. In that time there has significant progress in increasing their use and availability; but there are still a number of barriers and a sense of frustration among many in the sector that their full potential is not yet being realised.
The major benefits of APIs are widely appreciated, such as their role in collecting and updating data, obtaining more value from legacy digital systems and supporting the development of new services, both within organisations and across organisations. Their importance is growing with the emergence of internet of things technologies for the building of smart places, and the immense potential of AI in public services, as they provide an appropriate channel for the transfer of high quality data, in real time for some applications.
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