The State Treasurer's Office, in partnership with SymSoft Solutions, has developed a new online portal for wading through the confusing array of economic incentives available to businesses through California state and local government.
Launched in December, the California Business Incentives Gateway (CBIG) has brought aboard 37 government partners and 111 incentives so far during the one-stop shop's first two months, and more will come.
The website is designed to be an Amazon-style marketplace that employs intelligent automation to help users easily find the incentives they're eligible for, based on their type of business, location and other factors.
"The whole intent of these economic incentives, that are legislative or statutorily defined, is that it creates business opportunities. So being that we consider the citizens our customers, we also consider small business, who is really a main driver of the economy in California, a customer of this," said Jan Ross, deputy treasurer for technology and innovation.
The website can be browsed by category, incentive type, business phase and government agency.
Website visitors may put the incentives they select in a "shopping cart," which then the directs the user to the offerer's website for more information. The portal also provides recommendations for "you might also consider" incentives. Users also can save their searches in a wish list, so they don't have to start from scratch at a later date.
The project, which was completed for less than $500,000, took a cue from a 2015 Little Hoover Commission report on customer-centric government. Ross and her IT innovation team moved the website project forward because business incentives — and the little-known agencies that manage them are very difficult to identify and navigate. If you're a small business, the task can be daunting without help.
For the portal's design, the State Treasurer's Office gathered input from the National Federation of Independent Business, California Manufacturers and Trade Association, GO-Biz and the California League of Cities, among others.
"We tried to consider what all of our customers were and bring them in and [give] them a voice in the shaping of it, so we're not rolling something out that says, 'I would never use that.' We think it's the philosophy of, 'If you build it they will come,'" Ross said.
