Did you believe that all the application development for a company was done in the IT department? You need to think again. According to the data by Gartner, by 2014, 25% of new business applications will be developed by citizen developers. Ian Finley, the research vice president of Gartner says that end user development is one where non-professionals believe that they need some application and they build it or modify some application to build what they require. The analysts say that IT professionals and leaders should create support systems for such end user developers. This trend is getting boosted by the simplified development tools and the cloud services. These can be used without the assistance and employment of IT professionals. The IT department has its main focus on big and long term projects. Because of this many requests for application development are rejected.

This has lead to the rise of citizen developers. Ian says that the need for applications is much more than what the time and funds allow. By creating citizen developer programs IT department will be able to fulfill those application requests for which they don’t have time. Ian says that the IT department needs to realize that they have to make good citizen developer programs and make a good citizen out of common people like us. And we need to be good citizens and not do something which might harm the company. We should create something which will be of value to the company also. If citizen developers are left unsupported and not supervised then it might result in a chaotic mess and then the IT professionals might have an extra load of work to clear the mess. Ian believes that there should be a separate work force to train the developers and answer their queries. He advises that a “trust but verify” approach will help in getting the job done perfectly.