Business Developer

A person whose day to day function does not require any programming exposure but she is technical savvy enough to assemble a business application which helps her to execute her business functions efficiently and effectively. She is Business Developer. 

You can spot her in tech support teams, marketing & sales teams, finance teams and many other teams.  She generally uses Visual Basic, Oracle Form, MS Access, MS Excel, Lotus Notes and other applications.

These applications have few distinct features:

1.       highly focused on a very small set of business functionalities

2.       very simple in technical design and UI

3.       developer of these applications are also maintainers and support persons

4.       these applications are data driven

Knowing business developers exists and as computer awareness (or should I say spread of ability to do programming) is increasing their population is also increasing, what should be the response of IT departments of enterprise as well as tool vendors?

IT departments should facilitate business developers by providing services and persistence layer, so they can develop the applications more efficiently and effectively. IT departments should care more about providing security, availability, durability, etc (non-functional requirements) rather than controlling the fiefdom of programming. 

Tool vendors can provide the tools to business developers to assemble applications and consuming services offered by IT departments. WaveMaker and Yii are two tools which are essentially moving in correct direction. Lot of SaaS platforms are also trying to do the same.