The Increasing Push Towards Citizen Integrators
Data management is quite complex. Organizations continue to struggle with their data initiatives irrespective of how mature their organizations' data management environments are. And the reality in most cases, is that many companies and data teams cannot keep up with overall data pipeline needs. Different teams across departments have a variety of data needs and all are important for visibility - but budgets, resources, and execution gaps creates limitations in delivery. This is where citizen integrators come in.
Organizations are empowering business users, IT Teams, and IT departments to become more focused on adopting integration tools that empower them to leverage multiple data sources, create their integration solutions and increase better customer support and overall customer experience. And now this can be achieved without waiting for IT project prioritizations or increased time to implement.
Additionally, the rise of the citizen integrator within an organization can lead to better user experience, technical knowledge, subject matter expertise and a focus on broader digital transformation.
Becoming a Citizen Integrator
As we've discussed citizen integrators and their increasing role with organizations internally and how to best meet their needs as customer use cases grow, it brought me back to when I was a business analyst helping build out data warehousing and analytics solutions internally. At that time, it never would have occurred to me that I could build out my own data pipelines to support other SMEs and internal customers. But the reality is that with no-code/low-code data pipeline platforms and the increasing need for self-service applications that accelerate implementations and support broader data management, now it's a reality.
There is always a balance between shadow IT and the need for strong governance, and the ability to be agile and make sure that people get access to what they need when they need it. It's definitely a balance that requires more than a blog to delve into.
At the same time, integration projects in general have different requirements based on outcomes irrespective of the data integration need itself. For instance, some data integration projects require building connectors or delivering real-time insights, while others are created to eliminate a backlog of workflows and support the need for better access to CRM data. Consequently, the number of use cases increase the overall need for citizen integrators and IT resources to collaborate to create a self-service integration environment and support ETL use cases across domains.
Organizations need to understand their data requirements so that citizen integrators understand the desired outcomes and make sure they take into account overall data governance needs so that additional data challenges do not occur. Here are some more ways. to learn about the value proposition of enabling internal citizen integrators.
Resources
Here's a recent Integrate.io white paper about citizen integrators and has some great industry stats:
The Citizen Integrator Advantage
Interesting industry podcast about the increasing role of citizen integrators:
Gartner podcast on citizen integrators
Listen to our own citizen integrator, Nestor Marroquin on our LinkedIn Live broadcast:
Best Practices for Citizen Integrators