Welcome back to our series on Gartner’s predictions for mobile apps and development where we examine each strategic planning assumption, and provide our perspective. In case you missed the first post, you may want to check it out.
The next prediction is related to the interesting topic of ‘Citizen Developers’ and what happens when IT falls behind the app development train:
Gartner Strategic Planning Assumption #2: By 2020, 70% of enterprise mobile apps used in enterprises will be developed or adopted without IT involvement.
AnyPresence Take: This is very much in line with what we’re seeing among our customers. Enterprises have difficulty prioritizing for different business units and application needs. In 2015, we worked closely with several companies who had increasing numbers of unsanctioned apps built by citizen developers in their business unit without IT knowledge. While it is great to see mobile apps flourish in the enterprise, this development process is in the best case inefficient, and results in lack of IT governance, and in the worst case creates serious security risk to corporate systems.
Gartner describes a citizen developer as "a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT."
In our experience, citizen developers tend to be most concerned with their immediate environment, looking at the problem that they are trying to solve so they can do their job. This is in fact, their job, and they should be encouraged to find innovative solutions to solve business problems. However, this approach of building applications in an unfettered manner raises a number of questions:
- Who will support the application once it is widely adopted?
- What other tools or backend enterprise services will it need to integrate with?
- Is the manner is which the app built consistent with security standards in place?
- Is corporate data consumed or exposed by the application safe in transit and at rest?
- How can this app be integrated into broader business processes to further improve efficiency?
- What have we learned from building this app, either positive or negative, that can be applied to future efforts across the company?
While we believe citizen developers should be encouraged, we also believe they should be “enabled” properly. Traditional methods of siloes development can be both timely and costly, with very little concern for security, IT governance, best practices, or reusability. So how to encourage innovation without stifling it with burdensome standards? The answer is a blended approach to application development that includes a mix of development freedom with “managed” service. This will ensure that line of business developers are given the tools to innovate and build apps freely, while ensuring the security of corporate data and sharing best practices across the organization.
Solutions like AnyPresence App LaunchPad help IT organizations to foster citizen developer innovation without sacrificing governance. The platform enables central organizations to define app templates that determine how corporate identity and data sources are accessed. These templates can then be published for selection and configuration through any web portal, like a developer zone or innovation hub for employees to use. Citizen developers can now participate in the innovation cycle by building simple apps from templates, which showcase coding best practices and ensure a baseline level of security and scalability for the apps. The source code generated from the template is completely non-proprietary, so advanced developers can make edits to the code as needed for further customization. The data access or SDK layer of the app can be restricted to compiled versions if IT determines that more security is required.
With a solution like this, IT departments can strike a better balance around enabling citizen developers within lines of business to innovate more rapidly, without adding too much risk and technical debt to the organization. Furthermore, these citizen-developed apps can be deployed, monitored, and managed by MDM or MAM tools, and can be improved upon by IT or advanced developers as needed.
Stay tuned for our next post in this series, where we provide our take on the third Gartner mobile app development strategic planning assumption:
By 2018, 65% of enterprise apps will include direct access to documents and content from enterprise content management (ECM) systems, up from 20% today.