Here come “information citizens”

Is your bank ready to serve the “information citizen”?

With the proliferation of mobile digital devices connecting everybody to everything, Gartner now sees the emergence of the information citizen. The firm describes these folks as “a growing class of casual information consumers seeking ease of access and use of information as a top priority.”

Gartner research indicates that half of organizations will not have an information strategy that addresses the emerging role of the information citizen through 2017.

Serving information citizenry

“An information strategy is a broad topic, but defining how organizations use and manage information affects all aspects of IT and business management and transformation,” says Joao Tapadinhas, research director at Gartner. “The majority of today's information strategies are not addressing the needs of information citizens."

Organizations are looking to big data to provide an enhanced experience for their customers. In 2014, investments in big data continued to rise, with 73% of organizations investing or planning to invest over the next two years. However, although many organizations are in the midst of rapidly maturing big data efforts, many questions and challenges remain around their information strategies.

Currently most information strategies do not define the role or address the needs of these information citizens. Gartner says that new types of information consumption platforms will need to include applications that provide information citizens with better access to the analysis of multi-structured data—that is, data that may include a user's business transaction data sources and systems.

These platforms will also include a wider range of capabilities, such as search-based queries of tagged information, visual and data-driven storytelling, along with easy-to-manage and easy-to-use information aggregation and governance of multi-structured data for analysis.

The majority of the consumption of information and analysis will continue to include the current solutions and solution architectures for information and analysis. Today, most consumers of information and analysis have evolved into using a fairly mature sets of tools, skills, and methodologies for analyzing structured and primarily transactional information from enterprise resource planning and data warehouse database management systems.

Current investments in information and analytic technologies and skills have, in many cases, not kept pace with the increases in computing and analysis capabilities. The information strategy is still firmly focused on maintaining the status quo.

Looking to the future

Going forward, information consumer applications will need to access combinations of information and analysis across multistructured data located in multiple cloud and on-premises services. The related integration technologies and business models for information consumer applications are still being defined, but Gartner believes that a market and set of market categories will emerge over the next two to three years.

Gartner says that leading-edge companies will see the business need to include information citizens in their information strategies and will ultimately provide them with new applications.