Many organisations keep the same data in a multitude of locations. Employee records, for example, may well exist in your core HR system, your learning management system (LMS), your payroll system, your expenses system, and in your online recruitment system. When an
employee joins or leaves your organisation, their data needs to be changed in all five locations – creating extra work for your HR team, and risking data breaches and inaccuracies. HR doesn’t work in isolation, so why should its systems? But there is a way for all these different systems to talk to each other: using something that programmers call an API, or Application Programming Interface.