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Where will the next great business application come from – SAP, Oracle, Microsoft? If research firm Gartner is correct, it could very well come from a growing legion of so-called citizen developers.
In fact, Gartner has gone so far as to predict that by 2014 as much as 25% of new business applications could be developed by citizen developers. Gartner defines a citizen developer as a user operating outside the scope of enterprise IT and its governance, who creates a business application for consumption by others 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,” predicts senior Gartner research analyst Eric Knipp. “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 foresees that four converging forces will drive the citizen-developer movement:
• Mass personalization. End users start to become developers as soon as they start personalizing software for their use. Mashup tools enable personalization while allowing reuse of existing services. Mobile devises are furthering this personalization of content and applications.
• Infrastructure industrialization. Cloud computing is on the verge of delivering an elastically scalable computing resource, freeing application development from infrastructure ownership.
• Changing demographics. With the retirement of baby boomers and the maturation of the digital generation, the workforce will expect technology to “just work.” Consumerization of technology is not a trend for these people – it’s a way of life.
• Developer tool evolution. Advances in programming tools, including those to create, debug, maintain and support other programs, has made application development more accessible than ever.
The rise of citizen developers will mean that organizations will have to make decisions around the types of applications they can afford to let go of and those that they will need to maintain and manage more formally, says Knipp.
“The bottom line lies in encouraging citizen developers to take on application development projects that free IT resources to work on more complex problems,” he says. “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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