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Since citizen developers are by definition not experts in building applications, citizen developers require immediate access to expertise and assistance as they need it. They also need an efficient and unobtrusive way to gather requirements, collaboratively build solutions, get feedback, and solicit new ideas.
This assumes the willingness of all users participate and collaborate. Therefore, the ability to encourage all levels of participation, to reward contributions, and to make an individual’s contribution value explicit is critical to the success of citizen developers.
This paper explains how these needs are met by a combination of Chatter and Rypple.
Click to download PDF.
]]>[F]or the less technically savvy, there are few, if any, options that offer simple ways to build situational business solutions. For these citizen developers, technical professionals should strive to provide business-friendly tools for self-service solution development. Technical professionals should also commit to not giving citizen developers the same tools used by IT just because they are available. New classes of visual composition tools and tools that support programming without coding are needed to support citizen development.
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You look at products like Lotus Notes and it's a product that was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder of Facebook was. The reality is that it's not a humorous joke. It was a great product at the time, but IBM has done a terrible job in terms of keeping it fresh.
Customers have been running this technology for two and three decades. They are hiring people out of school and they are coming into these, 'Productivity Applications,' and are saying, 'I don't know how to use this, this is not how I work. Where is my iPad? Where is my iPhone? Where is my BlackBerry? Where is my graphical user interfaces'. [Companies] are like, 'well, this is graphical user interface' and 'this is Windows'. It's just junk and that's what Lotus Notes is honestly…
… Just look at the terrible job IBM has done with their software strategy. They've had to move to an acquisition strategy because they left these kinds of core franchises erode. They turned them into cash cows and now they are getting trampled by these next generation products. I think [Microsoft] SharePoint is very much the same thing. It's kind of the grandmother's attic. These customers throw everything into it and then they can't find it and they don't know what's up there, and they don't know how to get it out.- [1]
[1] BusinessCloud9, November, 2010
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There seems to be some kind of instantaneous and all-pervasive communication at work when we observe the sudden twists and movements of a flock of birds or a swarm of fish. Whatever the mode of communication that may be at work with birds and fish, many of us now own an item that is capable of producing swarming behavior in us. That item is the mobile phone. - Michael Hugos]]>
One of the negatives of Zipcar, the company that allows you to buy car time by the sip (by the "trip"?), is that you have to get to the lot where the vehicle is parked before you can get on your way.
All this technology is available today. Other than some legal accomodations for driver-less cars, it just needs a few relatively simple apps (because much of what is needed is available in the form of web services) to become a reality. And Nevada has already introduced bills into their State Legislature to become the first state where driverless vehicles can be legally operated on public roads.
The disruptive impact on this type of scenario is huge. Car rentals, taxi cabs, parking lots, car insurance - all will feel the effects.
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When I was researching my first book back in 2003, I came across an incredibly prescient paper by an obscure economics professor named Kit Sims Taylor. The paper, The Brief Reign of the Knowledge Worker: Information Technology and Technological Unemployment, is best summed up in these 2 quotes from the paper:
The general theoretical proposition that the worker who loses his job in one industry will necessarily be able to find employment, possibly after appropriate retraining, in some other industry is as invalid as would be the assertion that horses that lost their job in transportation and agriculture can necessarily have been put to another economically productive use. - Wassily Leontief (1996).
... today's tech-savvy, well-compensated worker could become an expensive anachronism as tomorrow's technological advances offer new opportunities for slashing costs and improving economies of scale. A world filled with smart computers, all linked via the Internet, could easily undermine whole sectors of today's vibrant service and information industries. In the next century, lawyers, accountants, and brokers could be the secretaries, bank tellers, and mainframe operators of the 1980s. - Business Week (1998)
There was one example he uses that I have always thought really brings home the problem we have with unemployment:
]]>... sees a fruitful future for non-knowledge workers whose work requires an automation-defying interaction with the physical world. But there is more than one way to shear a sheep. The exact path by which knowledge replaces physical work - or by which bits replace atoms - often comes from an unexpected direction:
Sheep-shearing robots may remain technologically unfeasible for some time, but Australian researchers have come up with an injection of natural protein that causes sheep to shed their wool.