Individual departments are responsible for publishing their own content and one administrator maintains the system. New applications are developed in a modular fashion with the concepts developed in house and determinations made to see if outside help is needed for development. The intranet has been very inexpensive to administer. As new applications are created BellSouth has not had to update the user interface. The intranet has created an atmosphere of excitement.
Employees are very curious about the technology and are suggesting new uses.
BellSouth has seen great savings in cutting back on the use of paper to publish information. The ability to securely access the intranet from a remote site was very useful during the Olympics when BellSouth instituted a telecommuting policy. With the great excitement over this technology BellSouth has put together an Intranet Team. This team, made up of content publishers from various departments, will be responsible for mapping out the strategic direction of where they take intranet development. BellSouth plans to continue to move the intranet away from being a data repository to a foundation for interactive applications and electronic commerce.