I'm a "Web Development Elf" cool?... Yes cool!

Jan. 17, 2009

Didn't want to let this pass in the night, blogger and strategist at Undercurrent Mike Arauz picked up on the apps I have been exercising my brain on lately (retweetradar.com and spy.appspot.com) out of the blue and wrote a couple great posts... I mean the titles alone are classic, but they have some prefect messages that everyone in the web industry better be hearing and understand. You are hearing it from me, now listen to Mike.

Act I: Bigger != Better

From the first installment: The Web Development Elves

These great little sites didn't require a multi-million dollar creative agency. They didn't require a creative brief. And they didn't require a million dollar investment from a major corporate client. They just needed the curiosity, ingenuity, creativity, time, and effort of one clever tinkerer.

I really appreciate that Mike, dead on. Mike writes on the same vein I am about theses applications, it's not the change in technology that's critically important here it's the openness and pervasiveness of the new tools... anyone can do this... it's no longer just the game of big IT or big agencies.

Small websites, tools, and online services, built by independent developers will eventually dwarf the contributions of the major digital creative agencies.

Act II: Efforts playing outside influence the day job? - Benefits to Best Buy (my employer)

In the second installment: Web Development Elves II: Double Agent Mike picks up on the excellent article in the Economist "Generation Y goes to work" that mentions some of our work at Best Buy and sees:

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.

Mike got in contact with me and asked... yep, he got me again... turned it into this post: Web Development Elves II: Double Agent Read the whole post, but this was his final flurry and I couldn't agree more!

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.

Fun stuff! ...Now back to the lab...