Citizen developers to build 25 percent of new business apps


Citizen
developers will be building at least a quarter of new business applications by 2014, according to Gartner.


In an era of shoestring IT budgets, end users
are increasingly looking outside the IT organization for application
development (AD) and in many cases are building applications themselves.


Gartner defines a “citizen
developer” as an end user who creates new business applications for
consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by
corporate IT.


“End-user application development (EUAD)
is nothing new, but the risks and opportunities it presents have become much
greater in recent years,” said Ian Finley, research vice president at
Gartner.


“In the past, EUAD posed limited risks
to the organization because it was typically limited to a single user or
workgroup. However, end users can now build departmental, enterprise and even
public applications. While this change enables organizations to empower end
users and releases IT resources, it also heightens the risks of EUAD,”
Finley added.


IT organizations need to adapt to the new realities of
EUAD and build a citizen developer support program.


EUAD is being transformed by several converging forces,
including changing workforce demographics, the mass customization and
maturation of service-oriented architecture, simplified tools for new
development and the power of cloud computing for delivering IT capabilities to
end users with no IT assistance.


Though the potential for EUAD to provide
value is great, the risks to the business of poorly managed (or unmanaged) EUAD
can be severe. Gartner predicts that by 2014, at least a third of enterprises
without formalized citizen developer governance policies will encounter
substantial data, process integrity and security vulnerabilities.

 

IT leaders should work with the
business to identify just-enough governance to enable and protect citizen
developers and mitigate risks such as the reproduction of similar applications,
inadequate application life cycle management (ALM), the delegation of
responsibility for failed projects to the IT department and the ignorance of
best practices in security, performance, etc.


By TelecomLead.com Team
[email protected]