AOL Time Warner had developed countless pages of content between its many subsidiaries, none of which were developed by the same architects nor were they supported the same applications. Maintenance of the sites was cumbersome and time consuming, causing them to seek outside help. They wanted to integrate their systems and create a defined, central process to empower their employees to publish content.
AOL Time Warner struggled with the high cost associated with enhancing and maintaining their HR intranet. The relatively small group of IT employees who were responsible for updating content and site maintenance was spending most, if not all, of their time on site maintenance. This inefficiency created larger problems as no other employees were able to publish content to the site. The same set of resources also had to work with a variety of approval and publishing processes within multiple maintenance applications – many of which provided unnecessary and duplicate functionality. These conflicting applications were expensive to maintain and created further maintenance problems: user accounts were difficult to keep up-to-date and accurate because there was no central directory service.