While almost all CIOs believe mobile is good for business, half think the process of developing a mobile app takes too long, according to a new study released last week.

More than half of CIOs said they were spending seven months to a year to develop one app, while 35 percent reported it taking six months or less.

“The research confirms that while mobile plays an important and critical business role, the process to build and deploy apps is broken,” Sravish Sridhar, founder and CEO of backend-as-a-service provider and survey sponsor Kinvey, said in a statement. “These inefficiencies, redundancies, and resulting high costs are preventing businesses from creating apps that disrupt or seriously change business processes. It’s stifling mobile innovation.”

Why is mobile development so time-consuming? The study points to a lack of direction. In the “State of Enterprise Mobility” survey, one out of three CIOs said their organizations do not have a mobile strategy.

One of the major reasons organizations lack mobile strategies is fragmentation—75 percent of respondents said app development was driven by product lines and individual functions rather than by a central strategy. Another impediment to strategy reported by CIOs is the quick and challenging pace of change in mobile.

Rapid changes in the mobile market put pressure on development and operations teams to quickly adopt development and deployment practices to update mobile apps as expectations change, according to IT research firm Gartner, which also reported that the demand for enterprise-built apps is expected to increase.

Given the significant time investment it can take to get a mobile app up and running, 54 percent of CIOs in the Kinvey survey reported they will be standardizing the development process within their organizations. Sixty-three percent also reported they will be turning to cloud solutions to help increase efficiencies and reduce costs when developing apps.

“Enterprises that have realized true mobile success have two things in common,” Sridhar said. “One, they augment their internal capabilities with a cloud platform to add new mobile features and speed up development. Two, they standardize this platform across all lines of business, gaining scale and repeatability for their enterprise.”

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