According to a survey of 2,285 developers and tech leaders carried out by no-code software platform Retool, 60pc of respondents said improved employee productivity was their main metric for tracking the successful ROI on internal tools.

Retool carried out the survey in May 2022. Its subsequent report, The State of Internal Tools 2022, gives an insight into how organisations build and maintain tools. More than a third (36pc) said they used reduced business costs as a way of tracking ROI on internal tools, while just under a quarter of respondents said employee satisfaction and employee adoption were their respective methods.

More than half (57pc) of those surveyed have at least one full time employee dedicated to building or maintaining internal tools. The majority of these employees work in engineering (38pc), followed by operations (20pc), then data (17pc).

Internal tools are mostly built to support an organisation’s operations team (55pc), followed by customer services (52pc), sales (39pc), engineering (37pc), data (32pc), marketing (30pc), finance (26pc), IT (25pc), creative (10pc), partnerships and HR, (9pc each) and legal (5pc).

Operations internal tools were the most popular for all companies with more than 20 employees. This year saw a surge in the number of operations teams dependent on internal tools from the previous year. In 2021, only 40pc of operations teams depended on internal tools.

According to Retool, one reason for this surge might be the continuously broadening definition of the operations category, which is seeing specialised functions such as BizOps, RevOps, or DevSecOps emerge.

Slack (42pc), GitHub (42pc), Stripe (33pc) and Salesforce (20pc) were the most popular APIs when it came to building internal tools. Mode, Looker and Shopify were the least popular.

As for internal databases used to build tools, 53pc selected PostgreSQL as their number one choice, followed by other popular choices MySQL (35pc) and MongoDB (20pc). Neo4j, Cassandra and Oracle ranked the lowest.

Overall, databases were the most popular data source for internal tools, with 82pc of respondents using them. Internal APIs were the next most popular (63pc), followed by external or third-party APIs (44pc).

10 things you need to know direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of essential sci-tech news.

The post 57pc of companies have at least one full-time employee for internal tools appeared first on Silicon Republic.