TEKsystems: Mature In-House Mobile Strategies Lacking in Organizations

 IT staffing solutions firm TEKsystems has released a new survey examining mobile strategies of organizations in 2013 and has found that a shortage of in-house talent, and a lack of mature mobility strategies, are the primary drivers of project outsourcing to IT service providers. Key findings include:

• Nearly 80 percent of survey respondents ranked their organization’s mobility strategy at low to medium maturity and 40 percent reporting a weak mobility strategy. Only 22 percent said that their mobile strategy was mature.

• Over 80 percent of respondents said that their organizations were not homes to mobility centers of excellence, indicating a general lack of approach to developing in-house expertise.

• Over 40 percent of respondents said they have a hard time attracting candidates with the skills to address mobility projects, leading to 65 percent of organizations partnering with mobility vendors.

• The most difficult obstacle to developing an in-house mobile strategy (reported by 45 percent of respondents) was found to be how to address the need to support the range of mobile platforms.

“Keeping pace with mobile technologies requires organizations to have various skill sets outside of traditional enterprise IT, which many organizations do not already have,” said TEKsystems Application Development Practice Director, Sam Malek. “Often, going outside of the organization provides the biggest bang for the buck because vendors with dedicated mobility practices can deliver the full suite of required talent and services.”

Nearly 40 percent of respondents report choosing to outsource mobile app development. The top three reasons given were: better expertise available in-house (67 percent); lack of mobility development as a core competency in-house (56 percent); and faster time to completion (47 percent).