Citizen Devs: Everyone is an engineer now
The rise of 'citizen developers'—employees who build their own technical solutions outside of IT departments—is accelerating due to accessible AI tools. While this trend poses security risks, it also reflects a growing need for business agility that traditional IT departments often fail to meet.
Why it matters
Organizations must balance the need for security guardrails with the reality that employees will bypass IT to solve productivity bottlenecks.
Half your company is already routing around IT. The citizen developer has been around since Lotus 1-2-3, and guardrails are the only control ops has left.
You may not have heard the term citizen developer yet, but they exist, and they've been here for a long time.
In the nineties, it was the person in accounts payable who bought accounting software off a sales call and, whoops, now there's a Dell server plugged into an ethernet port. Or the early 2000s when the marketing team Dreamweaver'd up some site you have to figure out how to get on IIS 5. Today, it's the person on your sales team downloading Claude Code and spinning up an app that stores PII. Same person, different means.
You might be thinking, this sounds like shadow IT. BOO! It is. Shivers down the spine of CISOs and IT folks everywhere.
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