By the end of 2017, market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations' 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.
According to Gartner, 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. This is placing an increasing amount of pressure on IT to develop a larger variety of mobile apps in shorter time frames.
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
Integration is often the largest part of the effort of delivering an enterprise mobile app, with many app development teams underestimating the time and resources required for integration during the planning stage of the traditional waterfall methodology they are following. 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.
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. It entails many complexities and specific activities, such as UX design and psychology or cellular coverage testing, which may be more efficiently handled by an outsourced third party experienced in mobile app development. Gartner believes organizations will improve their in-house mobile development skills over time, but currently only 26 percent of organizations are adopting an in-house-only development approach, while 55 percent are successfully delivering apps using mixed sourcing.
