According to a survey by Gartner, those enterprises that have undertaken mobile app development this year, have deployed an average of eight mobile apps, which has remained relatively flat when compared with 2016. On average, another 2.6 mobile apps are currently being developed and 6.2 are planned for the next 12 months, but not yet in development. Also, 39% of enterprises globally have not built, customised or virtualised any mobile apps in the last 12 months.
The Gartner survey also revealed that 52% of respondents have begun investigating, exploring or piloting the use of bots, chatbots or virtual assistants in mobile app development, which is surprisingly high given how nascent these technologies are.
According to the survey, the primary barriers to mobile initiatives are lack of funds, worker hours and skills gaps. Other barriers include a lack of business benefits and ROI justification. In terms of spending, the survey revealed that actual IT spend on mobile apps is consistently lower than organisations originally forecast. Despite 68% of organisations expecting to increase spending for mobile apps, the average proportion of the overall software budget is only 11%. Those that plan on increasing spending in 2017 expect to do so by 25% over last year. For the past few years, Gartner’s research has shown that while organisations have indicated that they will increase their mobile app development budget spend, the reality is that spending allocation has decreased.
Adrian Leow, research director at Gartner stated that many IT teams will have significant backlogs of application work that need completing, and development teams need to rethink their priorities and span of control over mobile app development or risk further erosion of IT budgets and the perceived value of IT development.
Analyst Comment
This suggests that the enthusiasm to replace PCs with tablets has slowed in the corporate segment. However, it could also mean that companies are simply developing brower-based or HTML5 applications that don’t need anything special on the device, just a browser. (BR)
