A new study reveals that 80% of leading enterprises are forming new partnerships with “citizen developers”, industry professionals operating outside the scope of enterprise IT.These citizen developers help to close the skills gap for application development to drive greater collaboration and innovation across cloud, analytics, mobile and social technologies.
Raising the Game: The IBM Business Tech Trends Report was conducted by the IBM Centre for Applied Insights and is based on responses from more than 1 400 IT and business decision makers in 15 industries across five continents.
The survey found that 40% of all organisations still report moderate-to-major skills gaps across cloud, analytics, mobile and social technologies, despite these technologies being recognized as the drivers for key innovations.
The study examined common traits of “pacesetters,” leading organisations that are achieving tangible business results from cloud, analytics, mobile and social technologies. Pacesetters are finding creative new ways to narrow the skills gaps in their organisation, including gaps in general IT skills, application development or data analytics.
One way pacesetters are filling these gaps is via partnerships with citizen developers, an emerging group of industry professionals who create new business applications and help with IT decisions as a side venture – outside of their regular work responsibilities.
In addition to turning to citizen developers, these pacesetter organisations are twice as likely to turn to academia for product development and 70% are more likely to engage with start-ups for execution.
Organisations that actively crowdsource ideas and technology assets with customers, partners and academia drive deeper engagement for positive results, according to the survey findings.
For example, Esri, an IBM Business Partner and a leading developer of geographic information systems (GIS) software, regularly uses sites such as Github, a repository for open source code, to share and build apps for cloud, analytics, mobile and social technologies. In regard to its own product roadmap, Esri also conducts hackathons and application challenges that drive creativity and product feedback.
Esri recently sponsored a “climate resiliency app challenge” that was won by a student team from the University of Minnesota working on a semester-long project to assess solar suitability in Minnesota.
“Through our efforts in events like hackathons and application challenges that appeal to citizen developers, we ensure that we have a pulse on what leading edge developers would like to do with geospatial – and all of this informs our own roadmap,” says Robin Jones, director: platform adoption at Esri. “The outcomes are fast, beneficial and interesting for everyone.”
The study IBM indicated that pacesetter organizations are four to seven times more likely to use cloud technology to deliver social, mobile, and big data and analytics capabilities. Fifty-five percent of pacesetters are using mobile solutions via the cloud and are five times more likely to deliver social business solutions via the cloud than their competitors.
Realtime business demands realtime results, a concept that pacesetters have fully embraced by implementing a strong analytical foundation across business functionalities. The study found that nearly 90% of respondents have mature big data and analytics capabilities, while 60% plan to increase investment in this area by 10% or more over the next two years.
Additionally, the study found nearly seven out of 10 pacesetter organisations make analytical insights a significant part of their decision-making process.