The Rise of the End User Application

The Democratization of Software Development

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, video editing required specialty skills and hardware. Fast forward to the present day and everyone can take and edit videos on their mobile devices. The same can be said for software development. Today, kids learn programming in school and camp, development environments can be accessed freely from any browser, and simplified languages like Python have become mainstream.

Rise of End-User Development in Finance

Within financial institutions, non-technology development teams have existed for some time and are most closely associated with electronic trading or risk management businesses. Typically, these teams are quantitative in nature, developing specific pricing and/or valuation models that plug into a Technology-owned framework.

In recent years, a second category of non-Technology development has emerged, involving a much broader set of stakeholders building "End User Applications" thanks to spreadsheets, high-level scripting languages, and various other code-less frameworks. Fanning the flames for this rise, is the increasingly strict technology budgeting process.

Opportunities and Challenges of User Empowerment

Empowering end-users to customize their working environment and user interfaces offers substantial advantages by enabling individuals to create applications that precisely align with their unique workflows and operational needs. However, this empowerment also introduces additional complexities. Ensuring business continuity demands centralized and well-organized repositories, robust systems for integrating local customizations with regular software releases, and protective measures to safeguard database performance against inefficiently designed queries. Moreover, stringent entitlement management becomes critical to prevent unauthorized data access.

Expecting end-users to fully understand these optimization and risk management considerations is impractical. Yet, entirely shielding end-users from low-code or user-driven coding capabilities is equally unrealistic, as technology teams frequently cannot match the rapid pace of changes requested by users or prioritize user-driven enhancements as promptly as desired. A balanced approach, enabling users while maintaining sufficient guardrails, thus becomes essential.

Rethinking IT Boundaries and Security Models

Historically, territoriality between end-user and technology teams primarily arose from security concerns rather than strategic choice?essentially, to avoid inadvertently opening security vulnerabilities. However, with contemporary, properly compartmentalized systems, these territorial boundaries no longer apply. Securely designed, modern low-code platforms facilitate controlled customization without compromising security or compliance.

Governance and Risk in End-User Applications

In recent years financial institutions have instituted governance-driven prioritization processes that have left many projects unfunded, which further fueled the proliferation of end user applications.

As a result, large financial institutions have had to institute new governance models to manage the related risks and ensure quality. All the same risks that exist for Technology department developed applications exist for End User applications, including:

• Key Person risk
• Change management risk
• Operational failure
• Capacity management
• Data quality
• Secure storage of sensitive information

How 3forge Enables Safe and Scalable Low-Code Development

3forge's low-code development environments empower non-Technology department staff to build far more sophisticated, and high-performing applications with a fraction of the risk and support issues by:

• Providing a sound 3-tier architecture;
• Including plug-and-play support for single sign-on, role-based access, and version control;
• Providing a foundation that solves the hardest problems, including the handling of real-time data, support for horizontal and vertical scaling, data aggregation, and more.