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Gartner Predicts Rise of Citizen DevelopersBy 2014 "citizen developers" are expected to build 25 percent of new business applications, according to Gartner research. IT shops without governance policies in place to address this trend could face consequences, the study warns.
In its study, "Citizen Developers Are Poised to Grow," Gartner argues that user-created business applications are on the rise. According to the market researcher, by 2014 "citizen developers" are expected to build 25 percent of new business applications. IT shops that ignore this trend could face consequences, the study warns.
"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," analysts advised in an announcement about the June report.
IT shops should work to create a safe end-user application development environment and remove "the sharp edges" of platforms, where disasters could occur.
A second Gartner study, "The Consumerization of BI Drives Greater Adoption," acknowledges that tools used by consumers for BI have been encroaching into business IT environments as part of a general trend. The actual use of BI tools in organizations is still rather low at less than 30 percent, according to Gartner. Enterprise BI tools, in general, are frequently just too hard to use, too slow or not relevant to the task at hand, which may explain why consumer BI tools are getting used in organizations.
Gartner recommends that IT shops adopt a portfolio management approach to support these new consumer BI tools. That means having to manage different metadata models. Moreover, data can get lodged in different silos. Despite these problems, IT shops should take an accommodating approach, according to Gartner.
"The practical outcome of this is standardization by capability, rather than vendor, and the need for a BICC [business intelligence competency center] to monitor how consumer BI is coming into the organization," the report concludes.
The "Consumerization of BI" report particularly singles out mobile devices as the main platform for consumer BI application use. By 2013, one-third of BI functionality will be delivered through handheld devices, Gartner predicts.
Few vendor BI examples are described in the report, except for Apple with its App Store. The vendor with the most popular consumer mobile app selection could end up having a strong influence on which BI apps will get used in business environments, according to Gartner.
"It could be argued that the vendor that wins the competition for the 'best BI experience on a mobile device' will stand an improved chance of becoming a main BI standard in organizations," the report states.
