We’re increasingly living in a DIY age. But we aren’t yet living in a DIY age for mobile apps. In my view, it is time for most companies to start. There are a variety of technologies that are emerging that allow true DIY development of mobile apps. It is time to explore them. If every mobile app is being done by a consultant, in my view, you are missing out a huge opportunity, and possibly wasting a lot of money.

DIY is pervasive these days. Whether it’s self-service checkout at the grocery store, home repair how-to videos on YouTube, or your neighbor brewing his own beer in his backyard, having the ability to be your own expert greatly expedites our individual efficiency. It also leads to massive innovation as Eric Von Hippel’s research on User-driven Innovation has shown.

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But until recently, self-service has mainly been something we do on our desktops. Self-service software, tools like Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, create documents that must be sent around. We’ve all spent too much time dealing with too many versions of too many documents. These older tools were not intended to meet the demands of real-time automation for basic data collection that many companies need. We’ve all experienced that difficulty of having to email the latest version of a spreadsheet to a colleague or upload copious amounts of data from individual forms rather than having software that could do that for us. The problem with the documents that are truly self-service is that the information in them is not connected to an organized central repository.

Another form of self-service has comes form Software-as-a-Service apps like Salesforce.com and other simple web apps. These apps do allow customization by mere mortals, but only inside the universe of the app. You can add fields and such and the information collected flows to a central place for use by others. It is powerful stuff but the use you can make of these apps is generally determined by the designers. They are flexible, but they don’t create something that can be adapted to any use.

We’ve gotten to a point at which the power of mobile devices, pervasive high quality wireless networks, and the power of automated software development have created a huge opportunity for a kind of app that we all want but that has been missing. These are apps that are as easy to make as a presentation but can be deployed on the mobile devices that we all carry around.

Companies like Appcellerator, EachScape, and newer ones like Appery.io help developers create mobile apps faster. This is important but not quite the kind of self-service that will be transformational.

The kind of self-service experience I’m talking about is being created by companies like doForms, and a few others, who are bringing self-service creation of mobile apps to a far wider audience. By using these technologies, you can explore the scope of what mobility can do for you, how it can changes business processes, and be agile.