25% of Business Apps to be Created by Amateurs, Gartner Says

By 2014, citizen developers will build at least 25 percent of new business applications, according to Gartner analysts. If that is shocking, consider the amount of Web content now freely contributed to Wikipedia or many of your favorite blogs, microblogging sites and YouTube.

Gartner defines a citizen developer as a user operating outside of the scope of enterprise IT and its governance that creates new business applications for consumption by others either from scratch or by composition.

"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," says Eric Knipp, Gartner senior research analyst.

Better technology has also lowered the bar for becoming a developer, while at the same time, users have become less intimidated by technology, empowering citizen developers to do more than they ever could before, Knipp says. Y

"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 says.

"Citizen development skills are suited for creating situational and departmental applications like the ones often created in Excel or Access today," he says.