Speaker Biography

Randy Heffner

Vice President, Principal Analyst

Sessions Featuring This Speaker

Forrester's Forum For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

10/16/2014

  • 11:20 AM - 12:00 PM

    How To Create Killer APIs (Even If Business Stakeholders Don't Understand)

    With strong executive buy-in, many technology organizations are creating new ecosystems, more compelling products, and greater customer value. Technology organizations deliver great business value these days via application programming interfaces (APIs). But some businesspeople don’t get APIs. But this can’t stop AD&D leaders from moving their organizations closer to API value and the API economy. It requires a strong business-driven ethos and an understanding of how to fulfill today’s business priorities while evolving toward tomorrow. API design is a critical foundation, as is a keen insight into business ecosystems. In this session, you will learn:

    • How an organization’s API strategy is intertwined with its business strategy, and the variety of ways that APIs deliver business value.
    • How good API design now opens up a wide range of future possibilities.
    • How to craft an API strategy for both today and the long haul and, if necessary, doing so “under the radar.”

Research Focus

Randy serves Application Development & Delivery Professionals. He leads clients to infuse technology deeply into their business strategies (and vice versa). Application architecture and integration strategy are major focal points of his research, including how application programming interfaces (APIs) and other types of service-oriented architectures foster innovation and sustainable business flexibility. Randy's vision for integration strategy, digital business design, establishes business-first design principles for leveraging multiple integration technologies and guiding the evolution of an agile business platform. A leading expert on designing business applications and software architectures that are secure and resilient in the face of continuous business and technology change, Randy has for the past 30-plus years, and across multiple industry sectors, led solution architects in using technology to delight customers and to continuously improve business outcomes.

Particular drill-down areas within Randy's research include general application architecture and design issues; overall IT architecture strategy; architectures for customer digital experience; API/SOA strategy; API management, governance, and infrastructure; application security architecture; best practices for API design; and integrating enterprise architecture and governance with agile solution delivery. For more than 13 years, Randy has helped Forrester clients achieve sustainable business agility in their pursuit of continuous improvement to business outcomes.

Previous Work Experience

Randy has extensive experience with enterprise architecture management and application architecture and design. Randy was a chief architect at Sprint, where he led enterprise architecture and standardization efforts, along with the analysis and introduction of application servers, component architectures, object-oriented development, application security architectures, CORBA, distributed transaction management, and other new technologies. His IT experience also includes technology leadership, management, and application development with a big five consultancy and in the retail and litigation support industries.

Education

Randy received a bachelor's of business administration from Baylor University's business school, where he was named the outstanding student in computer information systems.