Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

Remember the web development elves? The inspiration for that post was Ben Hedrington, the developer behind retweetradar.com and spy.appspot.com.

Well, the other day, I read this short article from the Economist about how companies are learning to adapt to the expectations and take advantage of the unique talents of their younger employees. Best Buy has been using their young employee's tech-savvy to save them millions of dollars and to make useful additions to their web-presence:

Net Geners’ knowledge of internet technology can also help companies save money. Consider the case of Best Buy, a big American consumer-electronics retailer. Keen to create a new employee portal, the firm contacted an external consultancy that quoted it a price of several million dollars. Shocked by this, a group of young Best Buy employees put together a small team of developers from their own networks who produced a new portal for about $250,000. Another Net Gener at the company cobbled together a mobile-phone version of Best Buy’s website for fun in seven days in his spare time.

Guess who built that mobile version of Best Buy's website in a week? None other than Ben Hedrington, the web development elf. I sent Ben an email and asked him how m.bestbuy.com came to be?

The mobile site was conceived of, prototyped, and built almost 2 years ago largely on my spare time. The site was quickly put together in seven days [using] very rudimentary data feeds from BestBuy.com, enough to be dangerous, but not do everything I wished. I was trying to show people I work with that these concepts are simple to execute, Mobile HTML sites are about equivalent to sites in 1998 :), and can be prototyped in production inexpensively and quickly rather than a big IT project where you needed to flesh out "requirements" for a channel that is in it's infancy and would change 10 times before you finish your too long and too expensive project.

The mobile site is primarily informational, allowing people in a store to look up product specs and user reviews from their phone while they're browsing.

The tools are out there to let anyone deliver competent web applications with less and less work that actually add value and can be iterated and grown over time rather than big IT efforts looking to deliver the world that falter under their own weight.

Big corporations are so used to working with big agencies on big projects that it's difficult for them to adapt to this new way of working. Small projects. Iterative process. Limited bureaucracy. But, best of all, small budgets and limited risk.

Every corporation in the world should be seeking out this kind of embedded intelligence, and making effective use of it. Create systems for discovering these talents. Create regular rewards for employees who share these talents. And create ways for groups of employees to find each other and begin collaborating.

More and more you will find that this is how people expect to work - flexible interests, collaborative, non-hierarchical - because this is how the internet works. Adapt.

Best Buy is continuing to embrace this thinking. Ben has a challenge for you (and your companies):

This thinking continues to progress with remix.bestbuy.com where we are putting the data into publicly available APIs. I challenge your readers [to] sign up for Best Buy Remix and create a better mobile site than I could at the time... it very is possible with the tools at your finger tips.