Simplifying Start-Up

Dec 2008 , Sponsored by Microsoft

Among the challenges a new business owner must face, dealing with government is one of the more tiresome. At least that's true if the government is still operating in a paper-based world. The owner must determine which permits, licenses and registrations the business requires, make phone calls or visits to get the right forms, and then complete them, often filling in the same information numerous times. Then the owner returns the forms and waits days or weeks for certificates and authorizations to arrive.

Fortunately for businesses in South Carolina, those hours of effort and tangles of red tape have faded into history. Today an owner just needs to visit the South Carolina Business One Stop (SCBOS) Web site to conduct the transactions required to start a business or meet ongoing obligations.

The need for such a system was clear when state officials began to develop SCBOS. "It was just amazing how many places the business owners had to go to conduct these transactions," said Mike Garon, senior administrator and CIO of the South Carolina Department of Revenue. Even when they put in the necessary time and effort, business owners sometimes got hit with penalties simply because they didn't know they needed a particular license. A study conducted 10 years ago and substantiated again in 2007, found that a more efficient licensing and registration process would save a business 47 hours of work on average, and would save the state's business community $7 million a year.

Initially government officials developed a Web page that offered links to agency sites where entrepreneurs could apply for the licenses, permits and registrations that pertained to their particular businesses. But owners still had to move from site to site, following each agency's procedures individually. A list of links didn't make their lives much easier.

South Carolina started building SCBOS in 2005, with funding from the state's Department of Revenue. The state worked with TiBA Solutions, a Microsoft-Gold Certified partner, to create a system that would vastly simplify the way business owners obtained licenses, permits and registrations. "It's business driven," Garon said. "We developed it totally from the business consumer's perspective."

On-Screen Interview
To use SCBOS, a business owner registers at the site and then goes through an on-screen interview, answering a series of questions. The answers help determine which licenses, permits and registrations the business requires. The user's responses also provide the information needed to process those forms.

Behind the scenes, the system routes the user's responses to the relevant government agencies. Each agency uses its own IT to gain the necessary approvals, execute the transaction and return the result to SCBOS. In most cases, the agency mails the license or other document to the business owner the next business day.

SCBOS also computes the agency fees for each registration, license or permit, calculates a total and takes payment via credit card or electronic funds transfer. It uses the same kind of shopping cart and checkout procedures found on commercial e-commerce sites.

Agencies that currently participate in SCBOS include the Secretary of State, Department of Revenue, Department of Health and Environmental Control, Employment Security Commission, Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, Department of Consumer Affairs and Clemson University's Department of Plant Industry, the agricultural extension service.

Although the hub-and-spoke architecture allows each agency to process applications on its own, as far as the business owner is concerned, SCBOS looks and feels like one, seamless service. A single sign-on lets the user transact business with all seven agencies, and once he enters a piece of information, it becomes available to any partner agency that needs it. There's no need to reenter the same data repeatedly, which saves time and reduces the chance of error.