Citizen developers will be building at least a quarter of new business applications by 2014, according to Gartner. In a time of restricted IT budgets, enterprises are looking outside their organization for application development, but still building applications themselves.
Gartner defines a "citizen developer" as an end user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.
"End-user application development (EUAD) is nothing new, but the risks and opportunities it presents have become much greater in recent years," said Ian Finley, research vice president at Gartner. "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."
Citizen developers may not ultimately be a threat to professional developers today, but it could easily turn that way. Solutions like TrackVia are simplifying the application development process to a degree where coders could one day become obsolete. Take a closer look at the platform today and you'll quickly become a believer.
Many companies are using Trackvia today which provide good examples of the value the solution can bring to an enterprise, Healthways (a health and well-being company), for example, leveraged TrackVia to implement a more mature supply management process within their business, upgrading from a legacy system used for order tracking that was built on Microsoft Access of all things.
Healthways isn't alone however. Media and marketing information company Nielsen turned to TrackVia to more effectively manage their corporate workforce - identifying attributes such as which employees have high potential, which are mobile, showcasing their prior review scores, and overall corporate tenure. The talent tracking system that was created was developed through TrackVia in a matter of weeks.
If your enterprise has a demand for an online database and application platform, TrackVia should top the list of considerations. What makes the platform so appealing is its simplicity.
TrackVia makes it possible not only to build an app, but grant access to users and customize how those users interact with the app. Say for instance that you want to build a CRM application for your sales team to access when they are on the road. One of the most impressive features of the platform is that it is possible to upload a spreadsheet containing all the information available about your clients and their companies (it's possible to build an application from scratch as well). By creating relationships (again, very easy thanks to the spreadsheet upload feature) and customizing tables, our citizen developers can then create custom views, filters, formulas and forms (much easier than it sounds) so that users will have access to the information from both Web and mobile devices when and where they need it.
