SURVEY SHOWS LARGE PERCENTAGE OF COMPANIES WITH SIZABLE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT BACKLOGS

16 February 1999

by Cutter Consortium

Over 30% of companies surveyed said they had a 13- to 24-month backlog in application development, according to Chris Pickering, author of the 1998 Survey of Advanced Technology and Senior Consultant for the Cutter Consortium's Business-IT Alignment Advisory Service. Over 25% of companies said they have a backlog of 7 to 12 months, and over 20% have backlogs of more than 24 months.

The study shows that companies with no backlog are using purchased packages exclusively as their method of system delivery. Currently, 45.8% of the surveyed companies are using packages, while 50.4% are developing applications in-house and 2.4% are using domestic outsourcing.

Purchased packages are also the dominant strategy for legacy systems, with 48.5% of companies employing this method. Other legacy-system strategies include using middleware (17.8%), ongoing use (16.8%), componentization (9.5%), and rewriting (7.4%).

Just over 50% of respondants indicated that software reuse is an active goal for their company or department. However, at this stage, few shops are enjoying any great amount of reuse: 42.3% have achieved less than 10% reuse, 50% have achieved 10% to 25% reuse, and 7.7% have achieved 26% to 50% reuse.

The 1998 Survey of Advanced Technology gives a detailed look at the current status of advanced technologies at Fortune 1000 companies. It is based on a 227-question survey. The report is available from Cutter Information Corp. at http://www.cutter.com/itgroup/reports/sat98.html

--The Cutter Consortium