A new report from IBM finds that large organizations are looking beyond their enterprise application development teams to get the skills they need. In fact, up to 80 percent are working with citizen developers who have skills like mobile development, cloud computing, social technology and analytics. (Citizen developers are those who are not employed by the organization.)
“I love the idea of utilizing the talents of these scrappy citizen developers out there who are skilled in creating applications,” Sandy Carter, IBM’s general manager of ecosystem development, said. “This can help reduce the skills gap that exists in the industry.” The report noted that up to 40 percent of organizations acknowledge that they don’t have the development skills they need in-house.
In 2009, Gartner predicted that citizen developers would create a quarter of all enterprise applications by 2014.