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The Maker Renaissance
Why Enabling Citizen Developers Is Engineering’s Greatest Force Multiplier
For years, the relationship between “IT” and “the business” was defined by a fence.
On one side, business teams felt the daily friction of broken workflows, copy-pasted spreadsheets, and approvals that lived in someone’s inbox. On the other side, engineering sat behind a wall of JIRA tickets and multi-year roadmaps, focused on uptime and customer-facing features while “internal tools” quietly fell to the bottom of the backlog.
In that gap, Shadow IT exploded.
And it wasn’t born out of malice. It was born out of survival.
Surveys on shadow IT suggest that a large share of technology spending now happens outside the formal IT budget, and a big chunk of employees admit they adopt unsanctioned tools because “IT is too slow” or “the official solution doesn’t fit.” Analyst firms like Gartner even predict that within the next few years, most employees will be acquiring, modifying, or creating technology outside the direct control of IT.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s a second, unofficial tech org quietly operating inside your company.
As engineering leaders, we’ve historically treated this behavior as a bug in the system — something…
