We see it all around us -- qualified developers are hard to find, and those working at organizations are busier than ever. Today's enterprise developers not only need to build and maintain critical applications, but also play a more visible consulting role to the business.
That's why it's critical to shift development work to citizen developers, urges Karen Odegaard[1], managing director of global IT for Accenture. "IT organizations today have a lot of unmet demand," she explained in a recent podcast[2]. "We're seeing that when citizen developers have [the power to create their apps], they can create solutions 10 times faster than if they were relying on central IT solution delivery. There are great advantages for the people creating these apps as well as for IT organizations."
There are important advantages going to IT organizations, Odegaard says, "You're getting people closest to the problem to solve them. so you don't need IT to translate it. and you are likely creating solutions for problems that would have never hit IT's radar. and we're also as an IT organization, getting visibility to that. and it's arming us with knowledge to better solve for our people across the enterprise."
For IT, "this is a shift in typically how we do application development," she continues. "So we need to shift in how we think about compliance, and governance for technology to the platform level, rather than the app level, which is where we put most of the focus today." In addition, there will ultimately need to be ways to reuse and repurpose citizen-built apps across the enterprise, to avoid a glut or sprawl of such apps clogging up systems and networks. "We need the ability now is to re-harvest and centralize user-built innovations,"