Earlier today, my colleague John Paul Titlow posted a piece on comedian Louis CK’s DIY efforts to shoot and publish a performance video online. You can also draw some parallels with those enterprise folks who are building their own apps. Now comes this study done for Intuit that is worth taking a look at.

Intuit hired the Global Strategy Group to survey nearly 1,000 people who are building their own apps outside official IT channels. The survey found that half of information workers now turn to online databases and Web-based productivity apps, instant messaging platforms, video chat services and social networks to solve their own business problems. Many of them are taking less than a week to do so, too, and an overwhelming majority of these apps are still in use. Talk about creating the next legacy platform! Here you can see some of the other survey results (the full infographic is at the link above.)

The survey found that 17 percent of information workers said they select tools and software to meet their needs without IT approval or support. Of course, one of the tools used by the respondents is Intuit Quickbase, so these results are somewhat self-serving. But still, worth further investigation.