Spoilsport!

It's the early days of Web development, and this big software company wants to automate its issue tracking, according to a pilot fish there.

"They already had a service-ticket database," fish says. "They wanted to create something that would allow technicians to view trouble tickets specific to a given building or hallway by logging into a terminal and running the application to return the assigned tickets."

The company hired a team of consultants and goes to work on the arduous task of gathering requirements and specifying the app.

Their final estimate: $15.8 million and a minimum of nine months to build it.

Meanwhile, fish has an idea. He builds a simple Web page that uses a generic Internet database connector to grab data from the service-ticket database, and automatically refreshes itself every five minutes to stay up to date.

"The users could then set the desired filter for their location via dropdown or in the code," says fish.

"I posted it to our central IT Web site and demoed it to the IT director.

"Total cost, including a week of my time: less than $2,000. Each hall got a shiny new monitor connected to the Web page. I got a promotion. The consulting team got a lot of free time."

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