Gartner Predicts Application Development Shake Up

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, organisations 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.”