Many IT professionals in Asia Pacific are facing significant challenges when it comes to digital transformation and application development. A new report from OutSystems reveals that most organizations struggle with massive backlogs, no time to innovate, scarce resources and complex systems. And this problem only gets worse with more complexities in the business initiatives and demands for mobile and Internet of Things (IoT).
Almost half of IT professionals (45 percent) reported having a backlog of mobile apps, some with more than 10 apps waiting to be developed.
Although 93 percent of respondents said that mobile functionality is either a requirement or very important, 42 percent of organizations reported facing a shortage of mobile developers and 53 percent reported a knowledge gap in the skills needed to undertake mobile.
Almost three quarters (69 percent) of IT professionals said it takes more than three months, on average, to develop a mobile app. For 8 percent of respondents, the time required stretches out to over a year. Not surprisingly, this is leading to considerable dissatisfaction, with nearly half (43 percent) of respondents saying that they’re not happy with the current velocity of their application development team.
IT managers face all kinds of challenges when it comes to mobile development. Lack of skills, time and budget were the top challenges.
Mobility was the most common business requirement for apps, up from sixth place in our 2015 survey. In addition, 93 percent of respondents noted that it was either a requirement or very important to incorporate mobile functionality into their current and future applications.
Organizations are focused on finding the right technical approach to building their apps, which has led to significant experimentation. In fact, 44 percent of IT professionals said they’re either using, or considering using, low-code or no-code platforms to support their IT strategy. 43 percent also said that their organization is enabling citizen developers to take advantage of this technology.
Companies that have adopted low-code development platforms are seeing improvements in terms of faster mobile app development times.