Today's changing business environment, however, means that we must quickly evolve into a competitive telecommunications company offering integrated voice, data, wireless, and Internet services in and out of our original region, as regulation permits. As chief information officer, I am always searching for new ways technology can help the company reduce internal operating costs, improve employee productivity, or better serve customers. Our intranet helps us meet these goals.
Business computing is the area where web technology has made the biggest bottom-line impact to date.
Last year, we developed and deployed an intranet application that has helped us address one of our biggest business challenges. We were able to do that even though, at the time of the call, we didn't know whether telephone facilities were actually available to the customer's location. This was because we traditionally had invested enough in our telephone network to handle a normal number of requests for service at most locations. In the last few years, with the great economic growth in our region and with the increased demand for second phone lines caused by the Internet, we found that we had exhausted telephone facilities in many areas. If we promised customers the standard installation interval, we didn't actually know whether we could deliver on that promise.