Episode 9: New York Business Express

It's no secret that successful businesses are crucial to a thriving state economy. New York has a variety of programs designed to encourage and support small businesses (for example, the “Taste of NY” program).

Through collaboration and ingenuity, this principle led to the creation of the New York Business Express: a central online hub for entrepreneurs to start and run a business in New York State. This platform can be found at businessexpress.ny.gov. 

The New York Business Express website is a one-stop-shop for a variety of resources, including licensing requirements, available government incentives, and a step-by-step Business Wizard that clarifies what new owners need get their ventures up and running. Simplifying this process not only helps small business owners make their dreams a reality but also streamlines processes for State agencies.

Anton Dreslin, Deputy Commissioner for Technology, and Randi Harris, Manager of Information Technology Services, share the story of this crucial program: the initial idea, the challenge of bringing the idea to life, and the bright future ahead for New York Business Express 2.0.

Thank you for listening to the IT’S a Tech Podcast. For more information about ITS, visit our website at its.ny.gov. Follow us on X, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Transcript

0:01
 You're listening to the IT'S a Tech Podcast, an engaging conversation about the game-changing technology solutions being advanced by the state's Office of Information Technology Services.

 0:12
 Learn how ITS makes IT happen for more than 50 state agencies and over 20 million New Yorkers.

 0:21
 It's no secret that successful businesses are crucial to a thriving state economy.

 0:27
 New York has a variety of programs designed to encourage and support small businesses, for example, the Taste of New York program.

 0:33
 Through collaboration and ingenuity, this principle led to the creation of the New York Business Express, a central online hub for entrepreneurs to start and run a business in New York State.

 0:46
 This platform can be found at businessexpress.ny.gov.

 0:51
 The New York Business Express website is a one-stop shop for a variety of resources. including licensing requirements, available government incentives, and a step-by-step business wizard that clarifies what new owners need to get their ventures up and running.

 1:07
 Simplifying this process not only helps small business owners make their dreams a reality, but also streamlines processes for state agencies.

 1:15
 Anton Dreslin, Deputy Commissioner for Technology, and Randi Harris, Manager of Information Technology Services, share the story of this crucial program: the initial idea, the challenge of bringing the idea to life and the bright future ahead for New York Business Express 2.0.

 1:33
 Anton, Randi, thank you for agreeing to be our guests for this episode of the podcast.

 1:39
 First thing's first: tell our listeners a little bit about yourselves.

 1:42
 What is your career story and how did you come to ITS?

 1:46
 Randi, why don't you start?

 1:48
 Well, I started in 2006 as an intern for the Office of Technology while getting my masters at SUNY Albany.

 1:56
 I worked with the web and application development team at OFT for a few years.

 2:00
 Then I was hired for the e-licensing Chamber-sponsored project in 2012, which was the first foray into creating an enterprise licensing system for the state agencies.

 2:10
 Then a few years later, our team was transitioned to the New York Business Express project underneath Anton. And that's why you're here.

 2:17
 Yes. Anton, how about you?

 2:19
 I've, I've had a little variety.

 2:21
 I've worked at GE Aerospace, as a quant in Merrill Lynch and software development and other software type things with some large financial institutions.

 2:33
 I came to the state in 2014.

 2:38
 This also touches on the origin of Business Express.

 2:42
 So there is an effort called New York State SAGE Commission, which stands for spending and government efficiency.

 2:48
 And there's a lot of things that came out of that.

 2:50
 One of that is one of the things that came out of that is ITS. So literally the formation of ITS and formation of Business Express were started at the same time.

 2:59
 Yeah.

 3:00
 And Business Express was basically one of the ideas out of the SAGE Commission to make it easier to start, maintain, you know, run a business in New York State.

 3:10
 What are the bureaucratic hurdles that can be lessened by improved processes and improved technology?

 3:17
 So that was the vision from the SAGE Commission and the Chamber for Business Express.

 3:23
 And the, the concept behind it is basically is that prior to Business Express and prior to some of these government efficiency efforts, the individual agencies treated the public as a courier.

 3:37
 So they would make the public take data from agency A to agency B and then like, OK, that's good, now go get us

 3:44
 data from agency C and everything.  The agencies weren't, wouldn't work together.

 3:48
 So, the idea behind Business Express from a business perspective, the business community, small businesses or professional licenses is we would do the couriering between agencies and New York State then would be one state for the public.

 4:05
 So that's the origin story of Business Express.

 4:07
 Fair enough.

 4:08
 So, you mentioned that this idea was meant to simplify the process for business owners in New York.

 4:14
 Could you tell us a little bit more about that and give a little bit more detail?

 4:18
 Yeah, the one of the things there was the restaurant example is one of the ones that was always given, which is like how many agencies does someone who wants to start a small restaurant have to touch?

 4:29
 They have to touch, you know, they have to form a business, which is Department of State.

 4:35
 They have to get their taxes lined up with DTF.

 4:37
 They have to get their labor with workers comp and DOL and then they have to maybe go get DoH and other things.

 4:44
 There may be county versus state.

 4:46
 There's all sorts of other bureaucratic hurdles they have to get through.

 4:50
 So the idea how it simplifies is that business express, you come to the one state system, you enter the common data once and all the same, the agencies get the same common data.

 5:02
 So from the public perspective, there's a fewer touch points.

 5:07
 They can see the status of all these different transactions with different agencies.

 5:11
 And it's similar in concept to IES, which is the integrated eligibility system.

 5:18
 No wrong door. No wrong door, right.

 5:22
 And that's like multiple agencies that somebody may work with to get their benefits or whatever they're entitled to on that side.

 5:27
 So this is to help the people who are, you know, starting a business, but even small things like professionals.

 5:34
 So one story we like to use to kind of think about like what are we, who's the public that we're benefiting?

 5:41
 I consider a single parent who's trying to start like a barber shop or a beauty salon to kind of better their family's life.

 5:49
 And they don't know how to start.

 5:51
 Like they, if you try to figure out the bureaucratic maze you have to go through.

 5:56
 So Business Express is not just the filing of applications, but there's a business wizard, which is one of the big innovations, which is like, here's what I want to do, how do I do it?

 6:07
 Like what are the touch points I have to have with the state?

 6:10
 And that's like lowering that hurdle.

 6:12
 Like I have talked to people in the business community during this time when we were starting this and there was a guy who was an engineer whose family had a small motel business right up in near Gore Mountain.

 6:24
 And he just wanted to get a keg to have a bonfire for his guests.

 6:29
 He had no idea how to do this.

 6:31
 And this is not, this is a smart guy navigating and he was going to hire a lawyer for $5000 to figure out how to legally have a keg of beer for his.

 6:41
 I mean, that's, that's the bureaucratic hurdles that we're knocking down.

 6:44
 So that's those are the good news stories.

 6:46
 When you think about, it's not the work isn't done, but that's the kind of thing that we're trying to help the public with, right?

 6:53
 Real solutions for New Yorkers, right?

 6:57
 So what did the early days of the development of this platform look like?

 7:01
 I'm going to hand off to Randi here as the key person.

 7:06
 So in the early days, we were working with a vendor for all the development needs of the platform.

 7:12
 There was a platform that was architected for Business Express that the vendor had experience with.

 7:19
 So we partnered with them and they started the development, but then we started facing some challenges with the vendor in terms of what the vision of Business Express was and how they were going to technically implement it.

 7:32
 They were able to implement some parts of it, like they started our Business Wizard development, and they implemented our description page.

 7:38
 But when it came down to that application portion of Business Express and the concept behind what we like to call the business profile in Business Express, we just had challenges. Right.

 7:49
 So we ended up parting ways with the vendor at the beginning and then the state team took over the development for Business Express.

 7:57
 Very good.

 7:58
 ITS: very good at pivoting and just making solutions happen.

 8:03
 It was...what the state team did here.

 8:07
 I'm gonna kind of give some kudos to Randi and her team.

 8:11
 Well deserved.

 8:12
 They, they did things so, so this was built on a CRM, customer relationship management platform, which is what kind of we were given.

 8:22
 Here's the technology you're going to use, now here's a solution, now like try to get it working.

 8:28
 The vendor community said it's not possible and technically it probably wasn't possible, but the team came up with some innovative solutions that they actually coded a custom framework and implemented it in this SaaS platform and the vendor itself of the CRM system.

 8:47
 Nobody else had done this in the world.

 8:49
 And they were coming to us like, how did you do this?

 8:51
 How do you, you know, how do you...this is amazing.

 8:56
 Randi really led her team to kind of find solutions. You know, long term, technically there's, there's some efforts we can talk about that when in the future of NYBE from a technical perspective. But it was, it was basically a group of people who got together who looked for solutions as opposed to, well, it's not no, but everybody's telling us it can't be done.

 9:19
 And that's that's why Randi's kind of like the the key person event and we did it.

 9:23
 And we did it.

 9:24
 You made it happen. There were tears, but we did it!

 9:27
 So it's the early beginning of the development.

 9:30
 You have a plan, you implement your, your pivot.

 9:35
 How did the New York Business Express as it exists today finally shake out?

 9:41
 So the state team did a tremendous job.

 9:43
 We pivoted from the vendor doing the development to picking up the development in January 2017.

 9:50
 We first went live with the Business Wizard, our incentive Wizard, or our content and description pages around permits, licenses in New York State and any content around becoming a business and how to operate your business in New York State.

 10:05
 And then in March of 2018, we went live with our first transactions in Business Express.

 10:11
 We went live with Department of Labor's Business Employer registration Transaction and Workers Compensation's Board certificate of attestation of exemption.

 10:21
 And then since then we've added over 40 other transactions in Business Express all across various state agencies.

 10:28
 40! Yes, for Department of Labor, DTFWCBOCM Gaming and Department of State.

 10:34
 And then we also implemented what we like to call an application-specific wizard for the State Liquor Authority.

 10:41
 They had people applying for liquor licenses, but they were filling out the wrong application.

 10:45
 So we built a wizard for them that helped guide the users to the appropriate liquor license for them to fill out.  Setting them up for success.

 10:52
 Yes. Beautiful, wonderful.

 10:54
 
 

 10:55
 Touching back to the story I told with the motel owner who couldn't figure out how to get license for his...or permit for his keg for his bonfire.

 11:04
 There are almost 200 different liquor like alcohol licenses. Really?

 11:08
 It's not a trivial thing to figure out how to file, like this is it really is amazing.

 11:14
 So there's the wizard, the the state liquor authority wizard really is a big breakthrough in that.

 11:20
 Like what is it you're trying to do?

 11:21
 Are you trying to have a temporary, a permanent?

 11:24
 Is it you're selling wholesale? Retail?

 11:26
 Is it you're selling you're catering versus opening a restaurant?

 11:29
 Like all those nuances are different distinct licenses and the fees for licenses can be very expensive.

 11:35
 So finding the wrong one could be disastrous.

 11:37
 Yeah, I'm today years old finding all of this out.

 11:42
 I kind of assumed, but now it's it's good to know that that we have a solution for for this issue.

 11:49
 So we know what this platform is now and generally why it's important.

 11:54
 And you gave us some great examples of how a New Yorker could benefit from this platform.

 12:00
 What, what are some like details of New York Business Express that you want to like highlight?

 12:05
 Because we kind of give the 30,000 foot. Like drill down.

 12:07
 What's something we really want to highlight for people?

 12:10
 One more thing I want to talk about is we have the transactions and the Wizards.

 12:15
 There's also an inventory of, we call them index pages, basically a different page to describe each transaction, even if it's not live or even if it's not something that Business Express would implement for various reasons.

 12:29
 So there's close to 1,800 of these? Yes, 1800 and growing.

 12:34
 And this is all agency content about their license, their permits, or even some content that they have about what people need to do when they come to them in regards to either it's your business license and professional licenses.

 12:48
 So we don't just have information about businesses in Business Express.

 12:52
 We also have information on how to get a professional license in New York State.

 12:55
 Like for Department of State, we have information about how to become a cosmetologist in New York State.

 13:01
 And then with that, we actually in Business Express, allow you to apply to become a cosmetology...cosmetologist in the state of New York.

 13:08
 Really a one-stop shop.

 13:09
 Yeah, that's amazing.

 13:11
 Fantastic.

 13:12
 So it sounds like New York Business Express is already amazing.

 13:16
 It's doing amazing things.

 13:19
 Are there any up-and-coming developments for the platform on the horizon?

 13:24
 Yeah, there are.

 13:25
 We talked earlier about the technology challenges with the platform that was originally implemented on and the great job the team had done.

 13:33
 So there's a Business Express 2.0 effort right now going on to update the technology, make it vendor agnostic, decouple the framework from the CRM side of it, which is the index pages that all those you know, the informational pages.

 13:51
 So that's an effort that's going on, should go live next year, that'll provide a lot more functionality or capability for more complex functionality going forward.

 14:00
 And like I said, also decoupling from a particular vendor so that we can run this framework anywhere.

 14:05
 I'll let Randi go into more details there since she's leading that effort.

 14:09
 So with the upgrade, not only would we decouple from the vendor products, but we are also looking at doing UX improvements for Business Express and also launching our brand new dashboard that would be more intuitive for returning users in Business Express.

 14:24
 And at the same time, we're also implementing more transactions for Department of State.

 14:28
 We have what we like to call their the machine-to-machine transactions where you can apply in Business Express.

 14:34
 We send the application data directly Department of State and they will get an automatic response back to the user or whether or not your application is approved.

 14:42
 And those kind of transactions, there's no manual intervention from the back office user or from the agency user.

 14:48
 So we have those transactions and we're also looking at implementing Department of Health Wadsworth transactions for their clinical lab permits and certificates in Business Express in the upcoming year.

 15:00
 So we got like a slew of things lined up for Business Express and we're just going to keep growing and adding more transactions for the years to come.

 15:07
 Absolutely growing as the business climate in New York also grows and evolves.

 15:14
 Wonderful.

 15:15
 So if you had to identify one take away, either one of you or both of you from your experience with this entire project, a lesson learned, if you will, what would it be?

 15:26
 I'll let Randi go first.

 15:30
 Don't sell yourself short.

 15:33
 Like I mentioned earlier, we had challenges with the vendor and had to part ways and then the state team literally had to pick up.

 15:40
 We had absolutely no experience with the CRM solution.

 15:44
 Let alone learning how to use the first CRM, but now learning how to use this tool to house such an enterprise system.

 15:51
 It was just...we learned as we went along.

 15:54
 You know, there was a lot of nights where we would spend recoding a section that we coded because when we tested it, it was just not working.

 16:01
 There was a lot of nights spent reconfiguring or redoing the data model because what we had first structured just doesn't work.

 16:08
 Or the vendor product just didn't support what we were trying to do. Right.

 16:13
 And there was a lot of down times because we were struggling a little bit.

 16:16
 But the state team rose to the challenge and they did such a phenomenal job at the beginning and they're still doing a phenomenal job.

 16:23
 Yes they are. Now supported and growing the system.

 16:25
 If you look at the code base for Business Express then versus now, it has completely expanded and transitioned into something so much more superb than when we first designed and developed the system.

 16:37
 Absolutely.

 16:38
 It also evolved along with the New York business climate. And it's still evolving.

 16:41
 Even 2.0 is it's going to look night and day from a code base perspective because everyone's like all right, we've had years.

 16:48
 We've done this for years.

 16:50
 This is how we should really be doing things.

 16:52
 And now we have the time to really do it this way.

 16:54
 So it's it's phenomenal.

 16:56
 You know better, you do better, right?

 16:58
 Anton, did you have a lesson learned?

 17:02
 Don't accept what the vendor community tells you can and can't be done.

 17:07
 A lot of it is....

 17:08
 I came from the outside.

 17:09
 I've been with the state just about 10 years.

 17:13
 Part of my time when I was with the financial institutions was doing federal and state government contracts. And the state team, you know, build a build a good team, empower the team, make sure they...but don't believe what the vendors necessarily tell you.

 17:29
 They may not have the same goals.

 17:31
 Their goals may not be aligned all the time.

 17:33
 Doesn't mean that they're bad.

 17:34
 It's just that our goal was to fulfill this mission, you know, for New York State, for the betterment of the New York State, which is really, I mean, that's the whole vision of ITS is, is the same thing, which is how can you gain efficiencies, economies of scale, banding together to do more than you could separately?

 17:55
 And it's really that success, the success of ITS and the success of Business Express and some other great enterprise projects that have happened across ITS in the past, you know, since the formation of ITS all have that similar sort of background story to it.

 18:10
 Absolutely.

 18:11
 We make IT happen, right?

 18:12
 Exactly.

 18:14
 And find good people and get out of their way.

 18:17
 Yes, absolutely.

 18:20
 So I just want to give a big shout out to the state team for all the development work that they've done on Business Express.

 18:28
 On the portal side, I want to shout out Santosh, Victor and Aaron for leading the team that did a lot of the portal development for Business Express.

 18:36
 On our processing and transformation side, I want to shout out Chachawan and his team for leading all the effort on actually taking the data that comes to Business Express and sending it out to all the agencies for processing.

 18:50
 On our infrastructure side, Mike and CJ's team for supporting the deployments of Business Express portal and our transformation.

 18:59
 On our prod support team, Jen for actually dealing with all our Business Express prod users that are having issues and calling in and need some kind of support.

 19:09
 On our QA and testing side, Joanna and her team for testing all our releases.

 19:15
 And on our BA side, a lot of our BAS are not still with us, but Faith and Sarah, when they started out on Business Express, they were doing all the business requirements for Business Express.

 19:26
 And to Anton, who actually came in and LED the team and worked really hard with us, going to give you a shout out.

 19:32
 So, so we're coming to the end of our discussion sadly.

 19:36
 But before you both go, I have one final question that I ask all of our guests.

 19:41
 Please tell our listeners about something that you are looking forward to this year.

 19:44
 It can be, but it does not have to be related to your work.

 19:49
 Well, I'm looking forward to potty training my 2 year old and undertaking to be sure.

 19:56
 Listen, I am getting tired of wrestling a crocodile every time I have to change your diaper.

 20:00
 So it's time.

 20:01
 It is time, it is time.

 20:07
 Maybe something a little less adventurous, but, well, in a couple days I'm going to do a bicycle ride up White Face Mountain.

 20:15
 Wow.

 20:15
 So with a friend of mine.

 20:17
 So yeah, just and.

 20:20
 Get out in nature more often.

 20:22
 Absolutely.

 20:23
 Listen, the Adirondacks in the area we live in is so gorgeous, especially in the fall.

 20:27
 So I hope you have wonderful weather for that.

 20:30
 Fingers crossed.

 20:31
 So, Anton, Randy, thank you so much for sharing the story of New York Business Express with our listeners.

 20:39
 And we're all very excited to see what the future holds for this important program.

 20:43
 Thank you for having us.

 20:44
 Good talking to you.

 20:46
 Thank you for listening to It's a Tech Podcast.

 20:49
 For more information about its, visit our website at Its NY Gov.