That makes me really happy that were reaching beyond the Younger Generation were also helping those that are older. And since launch weve received a lot of press and some awards so if you will allow me the opportunity to go through some of this with you the mayor put out a press release and the the chronicle did an article on us and we received a spark award thats prestigious in the design world and the california Governors Office recognized us and the Harvard Kennedy school recognized us as a bright idea in government innovation and last but not least we were nominee with a web web ie award and as losers say its nice just to be nominated. We came in 4th. If you have been riding muni lately you might have seen this up inside the buses and we developed a muni ad and this will be running through 500 muni buses through the month of may and june to coincide with Small Business week. This includes representatives from other cities and the city of los angeles an Organization Called the National League of cities and even the white house which were very proud of and hopefully to inspire others to take a similar approach to government services, we created a retrospective and wanted to make sure we shared our Lessons Learned and this can be downloaded on the portal through that url and what what were the Lessons Learned . One of the most important is to get your leadership on board not only do we have the support of mayor lee i know the commission over the years has advocated tirelessly on behalf of building this portal and now were seeing the the fruition of all of your work. We talked quite often and we were honest and respectful of each other we didnt always agree but the head the head butting resulted in better results and you want to be sure you get buyin from experts and you want to make sure that you do this early on and what we did with all of the business permitting departments we brought them into the room did a 3hour workshop and had everyone contribute to the initial research and made them feel like they were part of the process from the get go and make it simple communicate as clearly and simply as possible write like a person not a legal team and im really proud that all of the content of the portal was written by myself and the team members rather than copying and pasting we took the time to write all of the content ourselves and manage the content the content was a lot more work that expected so make sure sure that you manage it throughout the process and make sure this is directed towards Government Agencies so make sure that you write your rfp qualitative and quantitative measures that you can achieve and work with different kinds of people i wanted to make sure that everyone had different skill sets so it wasnt just to mirror what i was an expert in i wanted to make sure that everyone brought in a different piece of their expertise to the table and thats why we were able to work so well together and we made incremental improvements that were valuable and content can be just as important as functionality. So what have we been doing since launch . Well, i have been saying this for a long time we can not just add technology to a flawed process, right . Now weve put information in one place on the portal and we want to look at at the process itself and try to streamline that and we decided to tackle restaurant permitting and we focussed on restaurants. Why restaurants . San francisco has more per capita than any other city in the u. S. And and city in the u. S. And i think most of us know that and 3. 2 3. 2 billion in Consumer Spending annually in our restaurants and thats a huge Economic Impact to the city and 30 30 million in sales tax in San Francisco and the Restaurant Industry creates 19, 000 local jobs and we analyzed data and projected on an annual basis theres 230 restaurants that register in the city every year and thats a significant number and we looked at 24 individual restaurant permits not every restaurant is required to have all 24 but you can have up to 24 and thats a daunting process for anyone, right . And worked with 14 city state and federal agencies. We did permit mapping and collaborated again, as a mentioned, with the Controllers Office and completed interviews and distributed online surveys to Business Owners and interviews with quantitative interviews with Restaurant Owners and inventoried it systems for all restaurant permitting departments and all this work will produce were currently finalizing a high level end to end map of the entire process and individual permit work flows you you will see and a detailed controllers report should be released at the end of may and interesting to see and with that report you will see specific streamlining recommendations that weve put together. And just to give you a quick preview of what this work looks like this is what the big picture looks like, so you cant see all of the details and this will be released in the final report but just to give you an idea, were going to give you a map of the entire process and commissioner white, im sure you will find a lot of this recognizable and beyond the big picture, for each of the boxes on the big picture, you will be able to drill in and what you are going to see is that the example that ive is shown here is a single permit and this is the entertainer commission permit and it fills up the 8 and a half by 11 sheet of paper and to the right weve done analysis on every single permit for 24 permits and you can imagine it will probably cover half of this room and thats just for restaurants and what were trying to do is really breakdown this information, identify the efficiency gaps and make recommendations to make this whole process a little easier on our Small Business owners. Next steps. Technology enhancement for the business portal and weve developed an an alytics program to identify potential site improvements and doing research and weve pro cured a Software Vendor and professional Services Vendor for the next stage of building out these additional features and what are these features . Looking at a crm platform and online permit form submission and remember in the current phase weve got a folder feature but users cannot create their personal accounts so in our current phase were actually building that feature so people can save the forms under their individual profile and come back to it at anytime and creating customizeable user checklist as well as Digital Signature integration thats currently being worked on and theres a ton of information in there that requires a lot of time and attention. Weve updated the content as legislation and needs change so updated information about formula retail about minimum wage increases and reporting requirements for Business Owners. We created two additional starter kits if you havent been on the portal lately, check those out and weve installed several versions of security updates as they become necessary to make sure that our site is secure and weve created a comprehension operations and training manual so that some day, if were not here, that we can hand off the training manual to the next group that maintains it and keeps it going. Further more as i mentioned earlier not just portal but streamlining and will continue through the end of fiscal fiscal 17 and mapping out the remaining application processes and integrate all of these processes into a unified plan and it will be a bigger version of what were doing for restaurants right now so if we tackle the philosophy was lets tackle restaurants first because its involves the most number of permitting departments and then if we achieve success there then we can scale out to the rest of the city and between and within departments and online and offline processes with the possible physical Onestop Center and Technology Enhancements include the build out of permit applications and working with the tax collect ors office and they currently allow businesses to renew their Business Registration online but new Business Applications are not online and were working very closely with the tax collect collect ors office and building out additional content in the business portal because the tax office has seen the value of the portal and wants it to be the first point of entry for every new business and they will be able to see all of the information related to registering a new business and connecting them to online Business Registration and the mayors goal of permitting in pjs is getting very close. We want to further integrate permit forms with electronic and Digital Signature solutions. Providing both electronic and Digital Signature solutions as as you can imagine thats a big hurdle to get over currently requires a wet signature and how do we translate that online and Electronic Payments most permits have a Fee Associated so its not just about putting forms online theres a couple of additional steps and we have to make sure they are secure and easy to use for our Business Owners and develop city databases and we have all of these different systems every department has their own database different way of doing things and how do we work with everyone to make sure that comes together thats a big loft y goal and we can get to a place where things are interconnected and as i mentioned earlier continuing maintenance of the portal and im serving on the Steering Committee for the mayors housing portal and they have seen success with the business portal and liked our approach and design and they are developing a housing portal for low Income Housing applicants and theres another initiative of building a jobs portal currently proposed not yet approved and were getting so many phone calls from different departments so many different people have seen the success of our business portal and now they want to replicate what weve done and learn from us and im trying to share my best practices so this kind of website really can be achieved throughout the city that its not just for businesses and lastly, this is our christmas photo for the team. Once again i really want to thank my staff jason and angel the 3 of us have worked tirelessly over the last year and and a half and were here today because of all of their hard work and i wanted to be sure i recognized them. I see you found the ugly website. Exactly. I didnt get the memo and they are wearing their sweaters and they are both standing on on milk crates i wasnt. Any questions . Commissioners . Commissioner white . Thank you so much. I actually happened im in the process of opening up a second location and using the business portal for all of my permits and licenses and i know this very well and you have done just a really good job. Is the restaurant permitting process the only one right now . Yes. As as far as the mapping. It is a lot of work. I do know personally you can attest to this. Its up to 26 permits working with 24 agencies. Yeah. So you know the majority of them are all city departments theres also a couple at the state and one at the federal level that were looking at so the intent is to you know, lets tackle the toughest ones and i really wanted to come out str
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.