Previous page:Collaborative development
"Another uniqueness of BizPaL is that it involves local governments," Montrat continues. "Three levels of government are working together in a collaborative process. On the Steering Committee and the Program Managers Committee, everybody has a voice at the table. Everybody is treated equally."
What inspired this collaboration? Ralph Blauel, director of technology services at Halton Region and a former member of the BizPaL Steering Committee, believes it had largely to do with the personalities of its early champions and evangelists.
Among them were Elise Boisjoly and Michael Nadler of Industry Canada, Debbie Farr from the Province of Ontario, Don Garrish and Alex Kerr from Kamloops, Debra Amson from the Yukon, and Blauel.
"The key person who made this project a success was Guylaine Brunet, the first project manager," Blauel says. "She was the one who ensured that the interests of municipalities were well represented in the developing governance structure.
"She took our case to Treasury Board when it came time to fund the project. She met with a bit of resistance - it was a different way of doing business for Industry Canada and Treasury Board. Our Web sites don't have a Canadian flag on them.
"This was a huge departure for the communications people at Industry Canada," Blauel says. "Guylaine championed our municipal position, and got through some real changes to the way we do interjurisdictional projects."
BizPaL was conceived in 2002 by a group within the Business Services branch of Industry Canada, who submitted a proposal in response to an invitation by Treasury Board to provide funds for service transformation projects.
The initial proposal, along with a prototype of the Web service, was created by project manager Jim Lowe with help from consultants like Benoit. (Lowe left Industry Canada shortly afterward, but is now back with the BizPaL Secretariat.) The name BizPaL was invented by a co-op student, whose name is buried in records somewhere.
Before the proposal was submitted, Industry Canada convened a three-day collaborative planning session in Ottawa in February 2003. With Lowe as chair of the session, representatives from all provinces, one territory and seven municipalities hammered out a business plan for the proposed new service.
Treasury Board approved the final Industry Canada proposal on January 5, 2004, and ultimately provided about $3 million in funding up to 2006. But it wasn't the money that made BizPaL successful, says Brunet.
"It was partnership engagement," she says. "Absolutely, totally, unequivocally, partnership engagement from day one. They were part of the business case, the decision making, the governance structure. The partners drove this as much as the federal government.
"There was a strong project management view about partnership - that decisions needed to be made by the partners in order for them to engage," says Brunet, who had attended the February 2003 meeting as an analyst with Treasury Board and became project manager of BizPaL from May 2003 to July 2006.
"Nothing was built without their approval, without the whole consortium's approval. That's what made this project successful."
Process and technological advancements
The innovative processes and technology underlying BizPaL have contributed to the collaborative breakthrough.
During the pilot projects, teams carried out business process mapping of permits and licences required for a large number of business sectors. This was one of the first applications of Industry Canada's Business Transformation Enablement Program methodology.
The three pilot municipalities gathered information and helped create templates and application coding that facilitated rapid deployment of BizPaL.
"Any partner coming on board now can reuse the permit and licence information for industry sectors which have been previously mapped, and simply amend it to meet local conditions," says Debra Amson, program analyst with Yukon Territory's Department of Consumer and Safety Services, who is also a member of the BizPaL Secretariat.
"We launched in Whitehorse with permits and licences mapped for business startups in more than 200 industry sectors. Other jurisdictions have taken advantage of that and launched with many more than 200 sectors."
Another significant advance was the technology infrastructure. It was built by EDS Canada, which is still host for the central servers that house the shared data repository with which all of the local BizPaL services communicate.
Continued:Sustainability and governance
Download the proceedings from Lac Carling 2006 here
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