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Building a Data Storefront to Enhance Data Availability to Application Teams

At-a-Glance


Our client’s vision was to provide both internal and external product development and application teams with the most useful, accessible, and reliable data.

Find out how Sila helped make it happen through a shared long-term commitment to success.


Objectives


When our global aviation client launched a program to break down the barriers to accessing business data that enables the creation of innovative solutions by product development and application teams, Sila was asked to be a partner.  From the start, Sila has been helping address specific business problems including:

  • Slow/Lagging Product Development: A large amount of time is spent to find data, obtain permission to use data, store data, massage data, and expose data, which decreases time to market and causes delays in the product development process

  • Duplicative Efforts: Duplicate data sources and data access layers in each application are an inefficient use of time and resources

  • Application Cohesion: Disparate methods for acquiring, storing, and exposing data by individual application teams results in inconsistent application functionality and user experience for customers

  • One-off Data Extracts: Requesting data from another team has costs in terms of resource time expenditure, responsiveness, and scalability


Sila’s Impact


The Sila team helped get the program off to a strong start, supporting the launch of the initial set of data sources that were identified for the proof of concept and exposed as APIs. These included data from airlines, airports, the FAA, and weather information. Following these quick wins, Sila also provided technical support to develop APIs for other data services that were used frequently by teams, including foreign currency exchange rates and email utilities. Though seemingly simple, the use of standardized and modularized services such as these provided a time and cost savings by avoiding duplication and increasing speed to market.

Following that strong start, our client expanded our partnership and relied on Sila for support on a wide array of project and engineering services:

  • DevOps: Developing tools to streamline development and operations efficiency, including a Continuous Integration (CI)I/Continuous Development (CD) pipeline that automates build, unit test, and deployment to pre-production environments in a consistent manner across the program

  • API Store & Gateway: Building the storefront, which provides a way for developers to discover and subscribe to APIs, and the gateway, which provides Identity and Access Management (IAM), rate limiting, and logs metrics for each API

  • Data Procurement & Governance: Identifying, procuring, and maintaining a data catalogue of valuable data sources for exposure in APIs

  • Data Engineering: Creating data ingestion engines to process data from external sources for consumption by APIs

  • API Development: Making APIs to expose data and services with high re-use value

  • Technical Consulting: Providing technical guidance to external teams who want to expose their APIs through the program

  • Program Management: Providing program management structure & continued maturation that ensures strong communications and reliable execution

  • Agile Transformation: Delivering thought leadership in agile transformation, balanced with program execution experience to deliver maximum business value


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