Dive Brief:

• Six in 10 IT professionals face a backlog in the deployment of IT apps, with 19% of those developers saying the backlog consisted of 10 or more applications, according to a survey of 3,300 IT professionals from Boston-based software company OutSystems. Just 39% cite improvements in their backlog over the past year.
• Demand for IT apps is up: At companies with 500 employees or more, 65% of IT professionals had 10 or more apps slated for delivery, compared to 42% last year. Another 15% have 100 or more apps in their pipeline.
• In a bid to counter the backlog and create customer-centric products, the survey found most organizations have invested in deploying agile methodologies, design thinking and customer journey mapping.

Dive Insight:

Scarcity of key talent — and the ability to retain it once hired — is impactful enough to slow the roll of innovation inside any organization.

Though more than two-thirds of respondents hired IT talent in the last 12 months, only 36% of companies saw their app dev teams grow since 2018, a sign of challenges in staff retention. Only 15% said hiring tech talent was easy.

The uphill battle for talent directly impacts the top three causes respondents cited for application backlogs, said Mike Hughes, Principal Product Evangelist at OutSystems, in an interview with CIO Dive.

• Integration with legacy systems: If company knowledge is not well documented, turnover of key staff can ruin the chances of saving time during integrations. 
• Fuzzy and changing requirements: Staffers who are capable of leading software teams are often a scarce commodity Low-code platforms help retain knowledge and document every step as software gets built. "Using the existing process can be difficult, and slows down the documentation," said Hughes. 
• The time necessary for testing and QA: Depending on the focus of sites, having timely access to staffers with knowledge of specialized tools can be hard to find. "That can create delays, because these teams are often siloed," said Hughes.

The growing talent demands from multinational firms in the U.S., coupled with the talent deficit, has led multinational companies to ship research and development initiatives overseas. 

The scarcity benefits countries like India, China and Israel, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University.