What is a Citizen integrator?
Citizen integrators are business users who want to integrate applications and data faster without the help of an IT team. Nowadays, many companies are using non-technical persons who are tech savvy and are interested in software and data integration tools to move integration projects quickly. Citizen integrators use drag-and-drop interfaces to do tasks with ease.
How are they different from citizen developers?
Citizen integrators integrate data between IT teams and business users whereas citizen developers create applications without the help of IT. Nowadays, IT teams have much pressure due to huge backlogs and hence tools that are used to integrate without the help of IT department is used by citizen integrators to accomplish tasks.
Examples of Citizen Integrators
Some examples of citizen integrators are,
- Customer Support Manager
- Finance Specialist
- Sales Manager
- Outreach Specialist
- Marketing Lead
Characteristics of Citizen Integrators
The highly anticipated characteristics of citizen integrators are someone,
- who understands client needs
- who are subject matter experts (SMEs)
- who are interested in technical skills
- who uses reports, analytics, etc
- who understands data
- who understands business needs
- who is eager to learn day-to-day process
- who is a power user
What are the benefits of Citizen Integrators?
Some of the benefits of citizen integrators are,
- Improves productivity
- Drives down the burden of IT teams
- Increasing employee experience
- Reduces manual tasks
- Rapid deployment
- Easy maintenance
- Improves business agility
- Deliver impactful integrations
Why citizen integration is the future?
According to Gartner, citizen integrators will rise to nearly 25% which helps in integrating applications and connecting processes. A high level of data is needed to connect these technologies and it is not right to wait for the IT team to step in and do the integration work. Citizen integrators with the help of tools can do integrations in a short time.
They will help citizen developers to deliver the integration that IT teams can't afford to do. Some of the trends that will drive citizen integrations are the high level of developer tools, IT and business user support, data reporting, etc.