'Citizen Developers' and the New IT: Managing the Mashup

Attend any technology conference or read any trade journal or analyst report, and it won't be long before you hear about the lack of "business-IT alignment" that hampers software and systems implementations. The IT department can't figure out what the business wants, and the businesspeople don't understand IT, and so on.

But this isn't 1985 anymore. You don't have a mainframe data center buried somewhere deep in the organizations, spitting out greenbar reports for business users. If anything, business users -- especially incoming Generation Xers and Yers -- are incredibly technology savvy, and understand what technology can do for their enterprises. At the same time, IT professionals are increasingly growing business savvy. Check out any IT conference agenda, or university curriculum, and you'll see a healthy dose of business-focused education.

Darryl Taft discussed recent remarks by Gartner analyst Eric Knipp, who raised the possibilities that many of us will be both producers and consumers of our own software. Knipp refers to this as the rise of "citizen developers," and predicts that within the next five years, 25 percent of all new business applications will be built by non-technical users.

Thank the mashup phenomenon for this, as well as a new generation of easy-to-use object-oriented tools. Of course, with a service oriented architecture in the background, end-users will have ready access to tap into tested enterprise services to complete their tasks.

As Knipp put it:

"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. 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."

Sounds like a win-win for both business users and IT. 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." Would citizen developers turn to cloud-based resources to get the IT resources they need? Is there a risk of this practice spinning out of control in an ungoverned way, driving up costs and complexity in a new way?

Knipp says IT should focus on complex distributed applications, and also manage, to a limited extend, line of business applications.