Survey Highlights Enterprise Application Development Priorities, Initiatives

A new survey of IT executives attending Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit shows that application development priorities have changed little in a year. “Deliver applications faster” was at the top of the list -- exactly where it was last year. Only the percentage has changed; this year, 68 percent of respondents said it was a top priority; the figure was 61 percent in last year’s Summit survey.

The survey was conducted by Serena Software, a firm that specializes in orchestrated application delivery, IT, and business processes. What the survey results tell me is that IT is still battling the problems it faced last year, though concern about meeting these challenges has grown. For example, the second and third spots on the list simply swapped positions from last year. This year, “Expand the use of Agile” was second on the list (third last year); “Reduce app dev costs” was third this year (down from second in 2010, despite tougher economic times and tighter IT budgets).

The survey also asked respondents about their top application development initiatives for the coming year. “Managing applications as a business process” came out on top. Second (up from fifth last year -- the only dramatic change I saw in the survey) was having “end-to-end traceability across different tools and the application development lifecycle” (65 percent of respondents want to tie production code back to the underlying business requirements).

The survey also found that “85 percent of respondents cited managing application development as a business process as ‘very important to extremely important’ to their organization.” Nearly half (47 percent) put “standardization on methodology” on the list (placing it fourth overall), and 47 percent said “increased innovation” would be among their development priorities next year (putting it fifth in the list).

Serena says the survey revealed that “most software delivery teams today have the right tools, roles, and functions in place,” but IT’s biggest challenge is “in finding a way for these elements to effectively work together from initial request to release into production, so the entire IT organization can be as efficient and cost effective as possible. By putting effective processes in place, even the largest global enterprises can better orchestrate, measure, predict, and also improve the overall software delivery process.

In fact, says David Hurwitz, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Serena, “Most IT organizations today leverage multiple development tools and we don’t believe this is going to change.”

-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ

Posted by Jim Powell on 12/13/2011