Enterprise apps will outstrip the development capacity by 2017

MUMBAI, INDIA: By the end of 2017, market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organization capacity to deliver them, according to Gartner, Inc.

Gartner forecasts mobile phone sales will reach 2.1 billion units by 2019, which will fuel demand for apps in the enterprise that meet the high performance and usability of consumer apps.

Gartner principal research analyst Adrian Leow said enterprises find it a challenge to rapidly develop, deploy and maintain mobile apps to meet increasing demand, as it is exceedingly difficult and costly to hire developers with good mobile skills.

Employees in today's digital workplace use an average of three different devices in their daily routine, which will increase to five or six devices as technologies such as wearable devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) eventually become mainstream.

Despite this, a Gartner survey on mobile app development conducted in 2014 found that the majority of organizations have developed and released fewer than 10 apps, with a significant number of respondents not having released any mobile apps at all.

According to Gartner, there are four best practices that organizations can consider to successfully overcome app development challenges:

1) Prioritize app development

Mobile development teams are overstretched and have difficulty effectively delivering the growing number of mobile apps in their queues. The result is apps being built on a first-come, first-served basis, with the line of business making the most noise having its needs met first. This lack of value-driven prioritization leads to inefficient use of IT resources and a degradation in the quality of apps delivered.

2) Adopt a bimodal IT approach

Gartner believes organizations need to replace this traditional IT development approach with a bimodal strategic approach that supports innovation and agility to deliver apps more efficiently and quickly. Bimodal approaches consist of two models: Mode 1 drives the creation of stable infrastructure and APIs to allow apps to retrieve and deliver data to back-end systems without impacting those enterprise applications, while Mode 2 uses high-productivity, agile approaches to quickly deliver front-end app features required by the business.

3) Use rapid mobile app development (RMAD) tools

Using development tools that can produce apps more rapidly is crucial for enterprises to help bridge the gap between mobile app demand and supply. Significant innovation is driving this market and replacing traditional coding approaches, such as native development tools, with more effective RMAD tools.

4) Adopt a mixed-sourcing approach

Organizations want to have full control over their mobile app development initiatives, however, maintaining a pure in-house development environment is difficult to achieve given mobile is a relatively new competency to many developers.