By 2014, citizen developers will build at least 25 percent of new business applications, according to Gartner.
Gartner announced this bit of research news at it annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo
in Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 22. Gartner said that this advance should
both enable end users and free up IT resources. However, Gartner also
warned that IT organizations that fail to capitalize on the
opportunities that citizen development presents will find themselves
unable to respond to rapidly changing market forces and customer
preferences.
Gartner defines a citizen developer as a user operating outside of
the scope of enterprise IT and its governance that creates new business
applications for consumption by others either from scratch or by
composition.
"Future citizen-developed applications will leverage IT investments
below the surface, allowing IT to focus on deeper architectural
concerns, while end users focus on wiring together services into
business processes and workflows," said Eric Knipp, senior research
analyst at Gartner, in a statement. "Furthermore, citizen development
introduces the opportunity for end users to address projects that IT
has never had time to get to — a vast expanse of departmental and
situational projects that have lain beneath the surface."
Knipp identified four converging forces that are advancing citizen
development: mass personalization, infrastructure industrialization,
changing demographics and developer tool evolution.
Knipp said mass personalization is custom tailoring by a company in
accordance with its end users' tastes and references. End users start
to become developers when they start to personalize software for their
use, he said. Mashup tools enable personalization while allowing reuse
of existing service-oriented-architecture investments. Moreover,
ubiquitous access via mobile devices drives the need for further
personalization of content and applications, he added.
What Knipp refers to as Infrastructure industrialization is coming
via cloud computing, a model of delivering elastically scalable
computing resources as a service over the Internet. Cloud computing
frees application development from infrastructure ownership.
Meanwhile, changing demographics are resulting from the retirement
of baby boomers, and the maturation of "digital natives" means that the
workforce will expect technology to "just work," Knipp said. The
“consumerization” of technology is not a trend for these people — it's
a way of life, he said.
And, finally, developer tool evolution has made application development more accessible than ever.
Better technology has also lowered the bar for becoming a developer,
while at the same time, users have become less intimidated by
technology, empowering citizen developers to do more than they ever
could before, Knipp said. Yet, Knipp said enterprises need to be aware
of the limits of citizen developers and differentiate between the types
of applications that IT can afford to let go of and those that it needs
to maintain and manage more formally.
Moreover, Knipp said that while the blending of "IT and the
business" is inevitable, organizations need to make sure that they both
enable and govern end-user technical activity by:
1. Setting criteria for permissible solutions
2. Establishing an accessible development environment
3. Requiring "just enough" methodology
4. Including solutions in portfolio management processes
"The bottom line lies in encouraging citizen developers to take on
application development projects that free IT resources to work on more
complex problems," Knipp said. "Citizen development skills are suited
for creating situational and departmental applications like the ones
often created in Excel or Access today. However, complex distributed
applications and low-level, fine-grained developer decisions will
remain in the hands of IT, while line-of-business applications will
likely fit between the two and need to be carefully managed."
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