In today’s digitally driven economy, IT has become the lifeblood of enterprises. At the same time, it requires many people across organizations to be able to design and build applications that help move information to the places where it is needed.

In essence, IT has become much bigger than the IT professional or developer — IT has become the business.

To understand this trend, Kintone partnered with Unisphere Research to survey over 300 business and IT leaders from organizations of all sizes and across many industries, including the public sector, technology, banking/finance, healthcare, and more, to examine the progress of citizen developers within today’s enterprises.

Some of the most surprising results include:

One in five executives said the majority of their applications (more than 50 percent) were developed outside their IT departments

Citizen developers get their applications out the door faster than large IT departments.

At least 84 percent of respondents want to see their organizations do more to encourage and support their citizen developers.

“The results of this new research confirm what we’ve been hearing from our customers,” said Dave Landa, CEO, Kintone. “While working within IT policies and guidelines, business developers are empowered to create the applications they need to be successful more quickly, and beyond that, build workflows to help team members work more efficiently together, no matter where they’re located.”

In fact, according to the survey results the speed of application development is a big factor. Thirty-five percent of executives (outside of IT) are not satisfied with the speed of application delivery from their IT departments, more than double the 16 percent of IT managers that cited this as an issue.

"Our survey results show that business users simply can no longer afford to wait for their IT departments to come through with applications or services they require to make decisions,” said Joe McKendrick, lead analyst, Unisphere Research. “Don't blame IT -- they have their hands full with mandates to pursue digital transformation while at the same time trying to stay on top of security, manage data, and provision for growing workloads. We're now entering an era in which many users have become both creators and consumers of technology solutions.”

Low-Code Policies and Obstacles to Adoption

The survey also asked respondents about the policies they have in place to manage citizen developers and the low-code development process. More than one in four respondents have no policy of any kind in place, while another 42 percent say non-IT app development is allowed, or in some cases, actively encouraged. Only 16 percent have policies stipulating that non-IT app development is not prohibited.

According to responses to the questions on the obstacles to employing low-code application development, 61 percent of IT professionals cite data security concerns around non-IT development, while only 35 percent of non-IT managers say it is an obstacle. Insufficient governance of applications also stands out in IT managers’ minds, cited as a concern by almost half. Only 25 percent of business-side managers worry about governance.

Download your free copy of the report, “The Rise of the Empowered Citizen Developer: 2017 Low-Code Adoption Survey,” here.