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BizPaL Secretariat, Industry Canada
BizPaL - On-Line Permits and Licences Service
Leading the Way to the Government of the Future, BizPaL Helps Businesses Find Regulations From All Levels At Once
Challenge
Imagine yourself being an entrepreneur wanting to open a business on Main Street. Would you have any idea how to uncover the permits and licences from all levels of government that you might need to be compliant?
There could be several dozen of them in the case of a licensed restaurant. Many entrepreneurs open their businesses without being in compliance with regulations, not knowing they exist. Historically, it would take multiple visits or phone calls to government service centres and entities to ascertain all of the requirements, sometimes consuming weeks.
The BizPaL project was created to significantly improve the experience of businesses dealing with multiple governments and to serve as a model for similar collaborative efforts in future. It received a new allocation of funding in the 2006 federal budget as a key initiative to reduce the paperwork burden on small businesses.
Solution
BizPaL (Business Permits and Licences, www.bizpal.ca) is a permit and licence identification system. Integrated into municipal Web sites or portals, it gives business owners and entrepreneurs a single point of contact to find out in minutes what permits and licences their businesses will need from municipal, provincial, territorial and federal governments.
This ground-breaking project has brought all four government levels together to improve service to the one taxpayer they all serve. Launched in 2005 after three years of development and administered by the BizPaL Secretariat at Industry Canada, BizPaL is a partnership, with each government partner agreeing to a set of common principles that govern the collaboration.
Current partners include the federal government, the provinces of Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, Yukon Territory and more than 15 municipal governments. The service is spreading across the country, with expansion to scores of municipalities planned soon in Ontario and Saskatchewan.
Key to BizPaL's success is a distributed-content management model that permits partners to manage their respective data in a central repository, and the pioneering use of Web services to enable partners to seamlessly display to their clients not only their own data but the relevant data of other partners. Each municipal partner uses the BizPaL technology platform to provide the online service to clients directly through its own Web site. It is easy for new partners to participate without an expensive set-up, by writing an interface to the BizPaL database repository from a Web services application.
Through BizPaL, governments at all levels have come together to map and analyze their compliance requirements and processes. This means they can see and document for the first time the areas of overlap, inconsistency and inefficiency in these processes. In this way, the government partners are for the first time providing truly integrated horizontal service.
Results
One study in Yukon showed that, before BizPaL, it took a knowledgeable territorial government employee five hours over three days to identify just the territorial permit and licence requirements for a single business sector. With BizPaL, any entrepreneur can find complete information applicable to his or her business at all levels of government in less than five minutes.
BizPaL is the most advanced, widespread and successful project ever launched to integrate inter-jurisdictional government service delivery. The partnership has:
- Established an innovative horizontal governance structure to support decision making and funding;
- Developed new technology and data management approaches to permit governments to present both their own data and that of other partners;
- Developed information management guidelines and aligned with emerging pan-Canadian government data standards.
BizPaL serves as a model for inter-jurisdictional cooperation and simplifies the way that multiple levels of government offer services to a common client base. As that is a significant next step for most governments around the world, BizPaL also enhances Canada's global leadership in e-Government.
Of first importance, BizPaL is providing concrete benefits to small and medium-sized businesses, the primary job creators in Canada's economy. As expressed by a client from Kamloops, B.C., "BizPal helped a great deal with our business start-up - it's a step-by-step process that enabled us to save thousands of dollars."
Innovative use of Technology
The BizPaL service applies proven existing technologies in new ways to address barriers to effective cross-jurisdictional service delivery.
Instead of a traditional "government portal" approach of having partners link their clients to a central site, BizPaL took the approach of developing a service that could easily be deployed within each partner's Web site, regardless of their level of internal technical sophistication. The result is that the service becomes an integral part of the partner's site, thereby enhancing both the client experience and the partner's sense of ownership.
By implementing a single shared data repository with a distributed content management model, BizPaL offers a technical solution that can be shared at relatively low cost. It gives partners full authority and control of their own datea, yet lets them present the service as if it were their own.
The BizPaL platform consists of a Microsoft SQL Server database that is managed through a sophisticated Web-based distributed administration module (built in .Net/C#) that implements the business, security, and authority rules that underlie the BizPaL partnership.
BizPaL data is served to partner-owned Web sites via SOAP-based Web Services over HTTP. To assist partners in consuming these Web services, BizPaL has developed comprehensive sample sites developed in both .Net and J2EE that partners can re-use and, if desired, customize within their own environments. For partners who don't have the time, infrastructure, or skill sets to implement a Web services-based application, BizPaL hosts a .Net-based generic application that partners can integrate into the context of their site using inline frame (IFRAME) HTML methods.
A 2006 CIPA Winner!
For its exceptional application of information technology to develop new processes, bring benefits to stakeholders and serve as a model for future advancements, the BizPaL Secretariat of Industry Canada has been awarded a 2006 CIPA Gold Award of Excellence in the Customer Care, Not For Profit category.
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