GoKawiilHalf 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.
When it's discovered, teams tend to treat it as the security incident that it is. Maybe even a slap on the wrist for the person who was... simply using their autonomy to move the business forward?
It is a security incident, sure. But it's also a signal that people have shit to do and they don't have time to wait on the engineering organization. And it's not slowing down. It didn't start with AI either. Gartner found in 2021, before ChatGPT shipped, that 41% of employees were creating technology or analytics capabilities from outside the IT department. Two in five, back when it was still hard. And oh boy, it's sooooo easy now. Half your company is already routing around you. They just aren't telling you.
Who are these people!?
The SDR who asked for a lead management tool, watched it die in backlog grooming, and built a sloppy version himself in an afternoon. His company employs plenty of engineers. None of them work for him, and his ticket was never going to beat a roadmap item in a prioritization fight.
The operations manager at a regional insurance carrier that has never employed a software team in its history. Twenty years of institutional knowledge lives in her spreadsheets, and for the first time there's a way to turn it into something more without hiring anyone. She's not violating the IT policy on this. There isn't one. Nobody ever imagined she'd need it.
And us. The frontend developer dropped into the backend. The backend developer poking at Terraform. I'm not a Node expert, so when I'm in Node, I'm a citizen. My co-founder is a citizen in Elixir. Step outside your lane and you're one of them.
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