Jack Gold is the founder and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, LLC., an information technology analyst firm, covering the many aspects of business and consumer computing and emerging technologies. He just had an insightful on-target editorial in the Computerworld IDG Contributor Network entitled, “The great mobile app challenge”. Here’s a quick excerpt:

The demand for enterprise mobile apps has far outstripped most companies' ability to deploy even the most needed apps to the workforce. Enterprises face a real mobile app dilemma. They want their users mobilized, but are having a huge problem keeping up with the demand for the apps needed to satisfy their smartphone and tablets users. I have spoken with many enterprises, and the backlog of queued and/or user desired mobile apps is staggering. I estimate that no more than 15%-20% of proposed mobile apps actually get created and deployed, and in some companies the number is far less. There is no question that this has a negative impact on an organization’s need to maximize worker productivity.

This problem is a direct result of the difficulty in creating mobile apps. I see three major hurdles that most enterprises face. First, most companies are not adequately staffed with mobile developers and using more traditional desktop developers doesn’t work very well as mobile app development usually requires a specialized skill set.

Second, even if companies want to develop more mobile apps, most currently face a general lack of IT resources due to the reductions that have taken place over the past few years. Most IT organization resources go to maintaining existing production systems rather than creating new ones.

Third, and this is no small issue, the time to deployment of production mobile apps cannot take 12-18 months -- the typical amount of time it takes to deploy apps in the desktop world. This is inadequate for a mobile-oriented world. Apps must be completed in a matter of days or weeks to create true value for line of business needs.

What’s really needed is a way to enable the line of business units to create any needed apps quickly and without (or at least with minimal) IT resources. Most knowledge workers have been creating their own documents, presentations and spreadsheets for many years. The key is to take the mobile app development process to the knowledge worker at the line of business -- the one who knows what is needed to get the job done and to get the app completed and deployed in days or weeks. By raising the productivity of workers through targeted mobile apps, the potential ROI to the organization can be huge.

For Jack's full post, go to: http://bit.ly/21l8zCt