Open Data: Rise of the Rogue Citizen Developer and End-User Application Development

Citizen Developers are users who are not directly responsible for or authorized to build software applications or tools for an organization.  They are members of the organization who typicallyare motivated by a need to automate a task, improve the user interface, or derive or visualize information that wasn’t possible with the standard software set made available by the organization.  Often the citizen developer will create a business application that mashes up or combines data stored within existing applications.  In other cases, citizen developers create entirely new business applications to fill a gap in the capabilities of the standard software used by the organization.  Reduced IT budgets and IT initiatives are also driving end users to find solutions on their own.

Gartner has used the term citizen developer since at least 2009 when Gartner’s Erik Knipp first began writing and speaking about the phenomenon.  The term citizen developer is similar to citizen journalist which describes people who are not employed as journalists but who take it on their own to document and report on events by writing blogs and creating videos and making their stories available via the internet.

The term citizen developer is also frequently being applied to describe developers who create and make widely available applications based on Open Data sets provided by governments and other organizations.

Rather than citizen developer, from an IT perspective, a more apt description of these users are rogue developers.  Citizen developers often don’t consider issues like security as part of  their development to the dismay of IT departments.  Knipp warns that “CIOs who attempt to block citizen developers are fighting a losing battle.”

Ian Finley, research vice president at Gartner. said that “End-user application development (EUAD) is nothing new, but the risks and opportunities it presents have become much greater in recent years.  In the past, EUAD posed limited risks to the organization because it was typically limited to a single user or workgroup. However, end users can now build departmental, enterprise and even public applications. While this change enables organizations to empower end users and releases IT resources, it also heightens the risks of EUAD.”

While there are issues and problems with citizen-based software developement, there are also benefits.  Knipp said that “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.”

Erik Knipp predicts that by 2014 as much as 25 percent of software used by an organization will have originated by citizen developers.  That was his estimated published by Gartner in 2009 and now again in 2011.

eWeek quotes Knipp as saying “The bottom line lies in encouraging citizen developers to take on application development projects that free IT resources to work on more complex problems.  Citizen development skills are suited for creating situational and departmental applications like the ones often created in Excel or Access today. However, complex distributed applications and low-level, fine-grained developer decisions will remain in the hands of IT, while line-of-business applications will likely fit between the two and need to be carefully managed.