Written by Mike Hughes, Principal Platform Evangelist at OutSystems
Each year, OutSystems asks the industry what its most significant challenges are in application and systems development for our State of Application Development (SOAD) report. And each year, the challenges portion boils down to this: lots of work and not enough people to do it. Sounds relatively universal, doesn’t it?
But it is this problem we try and solve with each iteration of our platform, so we need to know, at a granular level:
- Where is this work coming from? Is it from new business requirements, new product or service delivery requirements, or simply “keeping the lights on” maintenance?
- Why is IT struggling to keep up? Is it a skills issue? If it’s not a skills shortage, are companies hesitant to hire? Should we petition Congress to add a couple more hours to the workday?
We asked these questions and more in our SOAD report. The four challenges below offer a little more granularity around our findings.
1. Cascading Backlogs
According to our research, 65 percent of IT managers have an app backlog. This backlog can be conveniently broken into two main buckets:
- Internal- or employee-facing applications
- External- or customer-facing applications
Not surprisingly, external or customer/partner-facing applications comprised the largest bucket in terms of new applications in the pipeline at 66 percent.
In days past, the requirements for developing internal applications fell far short of the required specs of external facing apps as far as usability and user experience were concerned. Does it work most of the time? Can you input data? Yes? Then who cares if it’s pretty; it’s done. Next project.
That doesn’t hold true for most new employee-facing apps today. And it is a death knell for anything customer-facing, which requires rigorous planning, development, testing, and rock-solid availability.
Mobile technology is changing how we access, use, and view data, and IT teams must keep up by continually adding to their expertise, whether via training or through hiring. Therefore, it is inevitable that business-as-usual development practices cannot and will not keep up with demand.
2. A Legacy of Mediocrity
In our survey, 63 percent of app dev projects planned for 2018 involve replacing and updating existing applications, rather than new, innovative development.
Consider what would happen if you strapped a rocket engine to a horse-drawn carriage. It would work for about half a second before the whole thing fell apart (or exploded). Similarly, building an external-facing app according to today’s standards and shoehorning it back into outdated legacy systems doesn’t work either. So our second problem ties back to our first of cascading backlogs.
Legacy systems are outdated by today’s standards. They were great in their time, but comparing the requirements for back-end systems then to requirements now is like comparing apples to oranges. Many of them require skills that are becoming niche. They often run on platforms that weren’t built for the kind of extensibility organizations are undergoing, and the risk management processes required to update or change existing code require far too many dev hours to justify the ROI.
This leaves them with a catch-22 of legacy systems holding back innovation.
3. Scarce Resources
In the United States alone, the job outlook for software developers (generic) is expected to grow 24 percent in the next eight years.
Two significant numbers stand out in our survey with regard to hiring and the availability of certain skill sets:
- 65 percent: The number of respondents whose organizations hired web or mobile developers in the past year.
- 55 percent: The number of respondents who claim to have outsourced some of their app development in the past year.
Somehow, 70 percent of respondents claimed they are still running a backlog.
Not having enough physical bodies to throw at the problem is only part of the challenge facing IT, where an overwhelming majority (80 percent) in our survey felt it was hard to find developers with the web and mobile development skills they were looking for. That sentiment is shared up and down the management chain, as even analyst firm IDG lists “retraining” and the “skills shortage” among CIOs as a most significant challenge for 2018 and moving forward.
4. Fear of the Unknown
According to McKinsey, many long-established firms are losing “as much as half their revenue growth and one-third of earnings growth” to more digitally savvy competitors. That’s certainly not because of the “competition is good for everyone” altruism. In a modern era where speed of innovation is the name of the game, many organizations are hanging back because of the “Big Unknown.” It’s difficult to break the chains of risk-averse, business-case prioritization when the alternative requires a leap of faith and a healthy dose of reinvention.
However, business-as-usual costs you in the end, and in our survey, 52 percent of respondents have taken the leap and invested in customer-centric innovation methods such as design thinking, customer journey mapping, and lean UX.
Challenges or Opportunities?
While these challenges may be holding organizations back now, the focus should instead be on the opportunities they present.
Take the lack of available application developers, for example. If you are having difficulty finding the right mix of skills and experience, and the idea of outsourcing your development efforts presents more challenges than you are comfortable with, consider fundamentally changing your development practices with a low-code rapid application development platform.
Projects using low-code application development platforms can increase time-to-market development efforts as much as 10 times over traditional development, testing, and deployment methods-and that’s without bringing in additional resources. Should a shiny new language or JavaScript framework pop up, no one has to spend six months learning it. Nor do they have to spend almost as long trying to figure out how a change is going to affect existing code. Automation handles that, along with most anything related to DevOps practices.
As for those large, legacy systems? Consider digitally transforming those, too. It doesn’t have to be a full strip-and-replace effort to start. Maybe build a new front end that makes it easier to access the old system, instead, and later consider undertaking a complete replacement.
Both scenarios are much simpler and faster with the right low-code platform that includes visually modeled processes, automates many of the repetitive tasks involved in traditional hand-coding, and deploys to traditional application middleware stacks that can run inside containers.
So, it’s time for more organizations to rethink their traditional attitudes toward conquering backlogs, resource shortages, legacy systems, and the fear of the unknown. By changing the way you view development and leveraging new tools, you can not only keep up with development demands but outpace the competition.
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