API integration and organisational agility outcomes in digital music platforms: A qualitative case study

Organisations deploy digital platforms to maximise value and transform their businesses. The success of most platforms is attributed to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the protocols enabling different software to communicate with each other. However, previous research on APIs has predominantly focused on the technical dimensions, such as design, and unintentionally neglected other social areas, such as organisational outcomes. This study seeks to advance organisational API research by adopting an agility perspective to explore the agility outcomes after API integration. Through rich qualitative data from a music digital firm, the findings revealed four primary agility outcomes: customer agility in the form of swift customer feedback, operational agility in the form of improved business process and delay reduction, partner agility in the form of embracing flexibility in processes and structures and expanding their ecosystem and decision agility in the form of fast decision making. A model showing the interplay and interdependencies of the agility outcomes was developed and provided depth and clarity to the findings. This study extends the literature by establishing how API integration influences organisational agility under conditions such as possessing capabilities and managing tensions during the integration process.