Outsourcing development helps many businesses keep their productivity up, but it also opens the door to unique maintenance and security challenges. We’ll explain how no-code development can satisfy productivity demands while keeping innovation in-house.
The demand for software has truly exploded in recent years. Studies estimate that mobile app downloads will skyrocket to 352.9 billion downloads per year by 2021, and today’s users already spend an average of 2.3 hours a day toggling back and forth between various apps.
As the demand for consumer apps has grown, the enterprise software market has grown with it. Businesses that succeed at enterprise application development can better connect with more users, get products to market faster, and increase their bottom line. But doing so is easier said than done, especially when high consumer demand dictates that enterprises produce quality applications at increasingly fast speeds. To keep up, many businesses have begun outsourcing software development.
Outsourcing Is On The Rise
Our world’s constantly increasing reliance on technological services has outpaced the supply of skilled IT professionals, creating a critical gap between IT supply and demand. Roughly 700,000 tech jobs went unfilled in 2019 as businesses continued to struggle with finding highly specialized developers for complex jobs. As the bar for expertise in key industries like cloud computing and cybersecurity climbs higher and higher, it only gets harder for businesses to find the right talent. In fact, research shows that 87% of businesses struggle with this issue.
Combine this with increased reliance on software across all industries and the advent of emerging technologies that drive high consumer expectations, and IT teams will likely find themselves staring at an extensive project backlog without enough developers to tackle it.
In response to these growing backlogs, many businesses are beginning to turn to outsourcing. According to a Computer Economics study, 2018 saw the highest rate of outsourcing for IT organizations since the Great Recession. The average percentage of total IT budgets spent on outsourcing rose to 11.9%, and application development in particular was the most frequently outsourced IT function. For these companies, outsourcing can certainly help to chip away at lengthy backlogs—but it also comes with some major disadvantages.
When it Comes to Outsourcing Development, The Cons Outweigh The Pros
When demand outpaces the supply of labor, outsourcing can cut costs and help businesses keep up. However, outsourcing development also comes with three key side effects that any business considering it should keep in mind:
Outsourcing leads to increased legacy maintenance problems in the future.
Working with developers outside of your company inherently introduces the potential for miscommunication. With the reduced supervision that naturally comes with work done off-premises, there is a greater likelihood that you’ll run into issues with your code down the line.
This problem is then exacerbated by the fact that you’re more likely to have lost access to the developers who wrote your code in the first place, meaning that any new developers that you bring onto the project will have to dedicate to understanding and fixing code written by a developer they can’t communicate with directly.
In the long run, you’ll end up spending money and time that could go towards innovation and new applications on simply understanding and maintaining your existing systems.
Outsourcing further increases the distance between IT and the business.
It’s hard for enterprises to align their business interests with IT projects under normal circumstances, but outsourcing makes it even more difficult for these departments to connect.
When IT is taken out of house, there’s one more layer of separation that can cause communication issues, expensive delays, or end products that fail to deliver. Similarly, outsourcing can also cause visibility issues given the added difficulty of communicating around an outsourced project’s progress over time.
Outsourcing can introduce increased security risks.
Outsourcing entrusts a third party with your most confidential business processes. With increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks on the rise, outsourcing development to a company with unknown security protocols can introduce new security risks.
Outsourcing development might offer an easy short-term solution, but it simply isn’t worth the long-term effects. To keep up with IT demands, enterprises deserve a solution that doesn’t come at the expense of their security and legacy maintenance budgets.
No-Code Development Keeps Innovation In-House
When faced with daunting IT project backlogs, businesses tend to have two options. You can either hire outside help by outsourcing, or you can find a way to empower your existing team to get the job(s) done. Here at Unqork, we think empowering your existing team is the way to go. No-code development offers all of the advantages of outsourcing—cost savings, access to a larger talent pool, increased focus on core business processes—without the frustrating and expensive side effects.
With a no-code platform, experienced developers and business users alike can quickly build the applications your business needs, all without writing a single line of code. This means you can nurture in-house talent while you build enterprise-grade apps—no need to compromise.
Unqork’s platform is in compliance with the highest security standards, meaning you don’t have to vet outside teams and hand over company data. Building applications without code becomes a more collaborative process to which your whole team can contribute, ensuring all business and IT requirements are met. What’s more, all of this can be completed in weeks rather than months (or even years), and for a fraction of the cost of building with traditional code.
The demand for software isn’t going anywhere, and businesses that can keep up with this demand are the ones that will have a chance of staying competitive. As you think about ways to get new products to market faster and at a lower cost, consider whether a no-code platform might be the right option for you.
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