The Gartner survey of IT and business leaders responsible for mobile strategy and/or custom mobile app development within their organisations was conducted in September 2015 across the United States, EMEA, Latin America and Asia/Pacific. The survey focused on understanding organisations' activities in mobile app development, covering both business-to-employee and business-to-consumer apps.

"Demand for mobile apps in the enterprise is growing, but the urgency to scale up mobile app development doesn't yet appear to be a priority for most organisations," said Adrian Leow, principal research analyst at Gartner. "This must change, particularly given employees often have the autonomy to choose the devices, apps and even the processes to complete a task. This places an increasing amount of pressure on IT to develop a larger variety of mobile apps in shorter time frames."

The survey revealed that the majority of organisations developing mobile apps are focused on custom mobile app development, rather than customising configurable apps or building from off-the-shelf templates. Gartner said that given most development teams use custom app development for all of their apps, extending this to mobile is a natural behaviour. Additionally, many off-the-shelf mobile apps still require significant development activity to integrate the back-end databases and applications into the mobile app front ends.

"If developers have to spend 70 per cent of their time getting the integration right, they shouldn't have to make compromises on the front end by constraints inherent in pre-packaged mobile apps," said Mr Leow. "The selection of pre-packaged mobile apps is also still quite limited from many providers."

Gartner said the range of mobile apps in use across the enterprise varies among user groups and lines of business in terms of the apps' adherence to corporate and security policies.

"When you add in the public apps that users are adopting personally, such as Dropbox, to use for business, the management problem becomes clear," said Mr Leow. "IT's ability to inventory and distribute these apps is fragmented at best, and more often it's incomplete."

Mr Leow said the solution to this issue of app management fragmentation and rogue apps is to pursue the development of an enterprise app store. The survey revealed that organisations have 26 mobile apps in their own enterprise app store on average, with a third of those mobile apps being custom-built, while the remainder are pre-packaged apps (such as Box, Evernote and SAP Fiori).

More detailed analysis is available to Gartner clients in the report "Survey Analysis: How Enterprises Are Tackling Mobile App Development in 2016." For more information, visit www.gartner.com