Simply seamless: business project aims to cut down on clutter

It’s an old story in small business circles.

Someone is, say, wielding a paintbrush, getting ready to open a small business on Main Street, when someone else walks up and says: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

So the would-be entrepreneur puts down his paintbrush and answers that person’s questions. Then someone else comes in with the same message: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Then there’s a third. And a fourth. They keep coming in, for days and weeks, up to 80 of them, asking for the same information. So: If you were that hopeful businessperson, would you conclude that they were actually helping?

That, in any event, is the burden that governments are widely held to have imposed on the small businesses they are trying to serve. Meeting government requirements to start a new business is a time-consuming, confusing and inefficient process that often results in duplicating steps for business owners.

And it gets worse, of course, because government regulators do not typically walk in and announce themselves. In many cases, business owners get into trouble, or incur unplanned costs because they’re unaware of regulations, or information sources about them. They don’t know what they don’t know. Now, however, an innovative project carried out by a team from three levels of government has successfully tested a new methodology that promises to help streamline government services to business. There are actually two projects; one has led to the other.

They were both described at a session of this year’s Lac Carling Congress by an enthusiastic team from Industry Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Consumer and Business Services and the Regional Municipality of Halton, Ont. The team came together in mid-2003 at the instigation of Industry Canada, with funding from Treasury Board.

That followed significant work by the Ontario Ministry of Consumer and Business Services, the Canada-Ontario Business Service Centre and Industry Canada to align their respective service-to-business visions and develop common information management standards, which had been presented to Lac Carling 2003. The team began gathering data in the fall of 2003 for what they called the Inter-Jurisdictional Service Mapping Project. The intention was to identify, as a test case, all the licensing and approvals that were required of someone opening a small restaurant in Halton Region.

The restaurant was assumed to be downtown in one of the four urban municipalities within Halton, just west of Toronto: Oakville, Burlington, Halton Hills and Milton.

When the analysis of the service-mapping project was completed at the end of the first quarter of this year, the project team members were dismayed by the results. “Let me paint you a scenario,” Debbie Farr, director of the Integrated Service Delivery Division of the Ministry of Consumer and Business Services, told the Lac Carling audience.