There are countless reasons this could be the case. These reasons range from poor UI code to poor business layer code to poor database code to an overloaded database, to a lack of caching of read-only data to ...
I've seen apps where it took over 50 database requests to load a form. Every time the user moved to another form, there were another 50+ database requests. That's just bad app design, and of course it caused amazingly bad performance.
I've seen other apps where the database was overloaded and everything was just slow. Not due to bad app design necessarily, though I always suspected it was a bad database design (they didn't have or use a professional database expert).
In short, your problem isn't rare, and the only thing you can do is walk through the code (or use a profile tool) to see what is taking so long. Odds are good it is something like hitting the database or making app server calls far more than you should.
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