Introduction

Citizen development is often touted as the newest development style for the DX era. Yet history shows it is anything but new. The concept of EUC (End User Computing) emerged in the late 1970s, and by the 1980s spreadsheet software such as Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel enabled frontline employees to build their own systems.

Its most enduring icon later earned the nickname “Kami Excel,” a sardonic Japanese term that literally means “god-tier Excel.” To understand citizen development properly, we must look this history in the eye. Hidden within it is a universal pattern: short-term success followed by unavoidable long-term negative legacy.

Context: In Japan’s workplace culture, Kami Excel became shorthand for sprawling spreadsheets whose creators were celebrated as office heroes. The term captures how grassroots ingenuity thrived precisely because centralized IT could not keep up—yet those same assets became brittle once their creators moved on.

The full series

EUC—the dawn of frontline-built systems

“EUC (End User Computing)” refers to end users directly operating computers, a role traditionally handled by dedicated IT departments.

The backdrop was simple:

  • IT had limited capacity and could not develop and maintain every business system.
  • By the late 1970s personal computers were spreading, Lotus 1-2-3 launched in 1983, and Excel soon followed. Non-engineers suddenly had the tools they needed.
  • Frontline teams began building small solutions tailored to their work and felt a surge in productivity.

At first glance this was a “productivity revolution.” Yet the artifacts lived outside organizational governance and lingered as legacy.

Kami Excel—from savior to liability

“Kami Excel” is a sarcastic label for massive, multifunctional Excel workbooks. The name riffs on early internet slang in Japan where “kami” (deity) was used playfully for something awe-inspiring.

Typical characteristics include:

  • Packing everything that should live in a database or application into a spreadsheet.
  • Thousands of lines of macros, dozens of sheets, and tangled formula references.
  • Acting as a “savior” in the short term by drastically improving productivity.

Over time, however, problems erupt:

  1. Personalization: Only the original creator can grasp the whole system.
  2. Unmaintainability: Complexity makes it impossible for others to touch.
  3. Compatibility pitfalls: Differences in Excel versions or operating systems break functionality.

Thus Kami Excel became the symbol of “short-term success paired with long-term liability,” a phenomenon now seen as something to avoid—despite the genuine heroics it once represented.

A pattern of inevitable negative legacy

From EUC to Kami Excel and onward to modern citizen development, the same pattern repeats:

  • Early adoption: It spreads explosively by solving local pain points.
  • Middle phase: Assets multiply and become embedded in core operations.
  • Long term: Management becomes impossible, migration becomes costly, and the artifacts harden into negative legacy.

This structure stems not from technology but from human behavior. Short-term success incentivizes organizations to downplay long-term risk.

Is citizen development merely EUC reborn?

Today’s citizen development—no-code, low-code, RPA—comes wrapped in buzzwords such as “cloud,” “API integration,” and “AI assistance.” Yet its core structure matches EUC:

  • Frontline teams build solutions to compensate for the shortage of IT bandwidth.
  • Intuitive UIs and rich templates generate quick wins.
  • Without governance, the tools march toward the same negative legacy as Kami Excel.

That said, modern citizen development does offer strengths absent in the EUC era:

  • Security and access control baked into cloud platforms.
  • API integration that bridges other systems.
  • Enterprise-grade products that claim to assume governance from the outset.

Vendors describe it as “evolved EUC.” But people have not evolved in half a century. Without applying the lessons learned, we will simply reproduce the same negative legacy.

Takeaways from this installment

  • Citizen development is not new; it is the return of EUC—with marketing polish at best.
  • Kami Excel epitomizes “short-term success, long-term liability.”
  • The pattern persists because incentives are human, not technological.
  • Modern citizen-development platforms advertise cloud, APIs, and governance, yet none of those features solve the human factors on their own.

Next: Was Kami Excel Truly the Villain?—From Savior to Negative Legacy