What is “table stakes” for product development these days? Do you believe that we should be following an “API first” development strategy?

I recently (well it was a year or so ago) came across some cool SAP SuccessFactors functionality which allows for a person to be put temporarily into another position, returning to their substantive position after a fixed period. Many of you will know this as “Higher Duties” or “Temporary Assignment” functionality. The problem I found (more recently) was that whilst most of the information about the temporary assignment was available via API, one key piece of information (very important information), the end date of the assignment, was NOT available via the standard SAP SuccessFactors OData API. ☹

Surprisingly, and luckily, the information is available via the old SFAPI (a SOAP based API, and we all know how much developers love SOAP!) So I can work around this for the moment.

This said, to my thoughts, new(ish) functionality, like HD/TA for SAP SuccessFactors should always allow for the data that can be seen in the frontend application to be available via the OData API. That should be “table stakes”. A modern HRIS must be supported by a secure, open, documented and complete API. I often ask potential customers during sales presentations, to compare SAP SuccessFactors with the other products they are considering to Google “name of HRIS solution” + “API” and see what is returned, whether they need to sign in to see it, are there supporting document, examples, etc. SAP SuccessFactors pretty much always wins this game (mainly because Microsoft and Google don’t have competing products in the space, because they use SAP SuccessFactors.)

SAP has come a long way in making its products somewhat developer friendly, so it really irks me when I’m told “We do not have this on our roadmap at this point in time, please raise an influence request”. So I did – https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/308298

If you’re an SAP customer and you manage to read this far into this post, please do me a solid and log in to vote for my influence request! Thank you! Whilst you’re there, have a look around there are loads of requests that would make so much sense to implement, vote for them too.

Customer voice is so important – and this “influence.sap.com” space is one area where we as customers actually get a little bit of a say!