Gartner Group, who is in the business of creating buzzwords in order to sell reports to explain what they mean, has coined a new one: The Citizen Developer . These mythical creatures are especially knowledgeable end users who will supposedly use new tools to build new business applications for use in the entire organization. The only problem with this concept is that these people don't exist. Oracle, whose speed of latching on to IT trends has increased dramatically over the last couple of years, have released or promised new tools for the citizen developers: Mobil Application Accelerator (MAX) for building mobile applications and Application Builder Cloud Service for building web applications. These are very nice and productive tools for building the front end of an application, but "citizen developers" won't be using them. The reason is that these are real IT tools that require the precision of real IT development. End users love their Excel precisely because it does not enforce any best practice. If you insist, end users might briefly look at Oracle's shiny new tools before they go back to their spreadsheets. So don't think that the citizen developer is going to take away your job. Or even help you do it. But do look at the productivity of these new tools to see if they are relevant in your situation.
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