Overwhelmed information technology and operations teams are increasingly being assisted by colleagues with virtually no training or experience in programming, according to a new report.

The rise of these so-called “citizen developers” is expected to accelerate further over the next two years, and will have a serious impact on enterprises’ application development efforts, 451 Research Inc. said in its report, “Custom Apps: The Engine for Digital Transformation,” which was sponsored by Apple Inc.’s custom-apps subsidiary FileMaker.

The report, which addresses the rise of custom applications in the enterprise, found that 82 percent of organizations surveyed say that citizen developers are becoming increasingly important to their operations. This prompted 451 Research to declare, “Data is the fuel for this explosion in customization, while intelligence is the oxygen and decentralized work flow creation is the spark.”

Another key finding is that almost 60 percent of custom apps – defined as applications which are designed and built by a business to cater to its specific requirements – are being built outside of IT departments. Of those applications, 30 percent were said to have been built by employees with no formal training in programming.

451 Research said the rise of citizen developers is partly thanks to DevOps teams — those that combine IT and operations staff — getting overwhelmed by increasing workloads. DevOps teams are struggling to keep up with the shorter development and deployment cycles of distributed enterprise apps. In addition, DevOps teams are unable to come to grips with the growing number of workflows and business processes that encompass everything from human resources to product development.

The researcher concluded that these problems leave many enterprises at risk of stalling in their digitization efforts. Just over half of the companies surveyed have deployed fewer than 10 custom applications, for example.

“Custom apps have often been pigeonholed as being only for mission-critical or niche processes for which there isn’t an off-the-shelf alternative, or for when companies don’t have the budget to pay for one,” the report said.

Besides a shortfall in budgets, custom app development is also being held back by a lack of time: DevOps teams are often simply too busy to cope, the report found. Throw in the fact that a third of enterprises say the management of data growth is their biggest IT priority, and 451 Research claims that we’re likely to see significant growth in “decentralized citizen development.”

Citizen developers are also being helped by a growing tool chest available to them that greatly simplifies application development. “As technologies become more intuitive, flexible and intelligent companies are rethinking collaboration, business processes and strategy,” the analyst firm said.

For providers such as FileMaker, which could clearly capitalize on the survey’s findings, the challenge will be to convince organizations with tight IT budgets of the advantages they can gain from custom apps and a more streamlined workflow.

One part of that challenge will involve allaying fears over security and governance issues. The researcher notes that one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is “decentralizing application creation while ensuring there is a companywide governance framework to maintain consistency in security and controls.”

If organizations cannot overcome this challenge, we could see a repeat of the problem of “shadow IT,” or applications that are installed without the support of the IT department, that causes issues with software incompatibility and security.

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