A few things an information strategist needs to look into

BANGALORE, INDIA: By 2017, more than 50 percent organizations will not have a strategy to address the emerging role of information citizen.

In a new report, research firm Gartner notes that a majority of today's information strategies do not address the needs of information citizens. It defines information citizens as a growing class of casual information consumers.

Although many organizations are in the midst of rapidly maturing big data efforts, many questions and challenges remain around their information strategies and their ability use business intelligence and analytics, it notes.

According to Joao Tapadinhas, Research Director, Gartner, “Information citizens will subscribe to a consumption platform and ecosystem which will develop and deliver applications comprising information structures and sources.”

To address this, organizations will need to include new types of platforms that will enable information citizens to analyze multi-structured data that includes both; a user's business transactional data sources and systems. This will be further enhanced with the inclusion of search-based queries of tagged information, visual and data-driven storytelling, easy-to-use and manage information, aggregation and governance of multi-structured data for analysis.

“Today, most consumers of information and analysis have evolved into mature sets of tools, skills and methodologies for analyzing structured and transactional information from ERP 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,” Tapadinhas opines.

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