Business Victoria
The Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development (DIIRD) has used ScenarioBuilder® to develop a decision tree and eLearning system that will guide home-based and small businesses through all their dealings with the Victorian government.
ScenarioBuilder® is unique in providing distributed content management to Process. ScenarioBuilder® lets authors use simple decision trees to generate web pages that guide people through complex processes. Enhanced with powerful form and rule creation capabilities, ScenarioBuilder® reduces compliance costs by making the right way, the easiest way for employees and citizens.
Challenge
Business Victoria was an election commitment in 2002 and announced in Victoria: Leading the Way, with $6,000,000 allocated over three years. Following the initial success of the project the Government increased this commitment by a further $18m to fund the project to 2009. The project is overseen by a Program Board chaired by DIIRD, with representatives from their department, State Revenue Office, Consumer Affairs Victoria, Office of the Small Business Commissioner, Office of the Chief Information Officer, and Victorian WorkCover Authority. It aggregates service delivery to business across all levels of government, using online technologies to simplify and streamline small-business interactions with government.
Business Victoria aims to:
- Facilitate business start-up.
- Improve access to business management resources, particularly relating to compliance.
- Improve government service delivery to reduce the administrative burden of compliance, particularly through 'joined-up' service delivery.
- Generate efficiencies in government operations through improving service processes and effective deployment of IT, including online services.
In the first instance, the Business Victoria program focuses on the needs of business start-ups.
Solution
ScenarioBuilder® is a well proven product that presents complex business processes, such as starting a new business, simply. It makes structured processes visible, accessible and repeatable. Business Victoria illustrates the power of breaking complex processes down into simple step-by-step guides. The Victorian Department of Justice uses ScenarioBuilder® to support citizens in managing common disputes without litigation. ANZ and Esanda guide customer service officers through loan-evaluation processes. Critically, all process support links to resources which are kept up-to-date in a central repository.
Business Victoria required a range of additional requirements for process and decision support. These include: directing citizens to only the relevant forms and resources; complex and secure form completion, storage, re-access and submission; integration with their enterprise CMS (NetCat™®); Learning Modules tailored to individual needs; presenting forms and resources using the branding of the relevant agency; and, finally management of all these processes.
Acumentum has built on the simplicity of the authoring and the intuitive process-support of ScenarioBuilder® to enable an expert with core knowledge of a structured process to easily capture Iinformation from that process to provide online guidance to help people get the right answers so they can achieve their desired outcome. Now ScenarioBuilder® allows authors to create forms (or rather applications) via a simple wizard style interface.
The wizard offers a comprehensive array of elements/fields (e.g. text boxes, drop-lists, option buttons, checkboxes, richly formatted instructions- and many more), together with validation and user-friendly error messages. User-entered data can be used to determine the path the user should take or which resources should be retrieved.
When entering data into the form, the user can save their work at any time and password protect it to resume later. This ability to save work, is invaluable for e-learning where ScenarioBuilder® guides users to the resources that are relevant and then saves these resources as a learning plan that can be revisited as needed or printed as an offline resource.
Moreover, where further assistance is required the user can share their saved progress and decisions with customer support or peers to instantly communicate their context to leverage the knowledge of experts.
Example - Select the right entity for a new business
In this example, a scenario is constructed that gathers information from the user about:
- Their needs in creating this entity - e.g., Will the business trade? For profit or not for profit?
- The relative importance of their preferences - e.g. Limited liability? Low set-up costs? Ease of sale? Access to business funds?
The form maintains running tallies for each of the potential business entity types based on the data and preferences the user enters. At the conclusion, ScenarioBuilder® presents the entity that best fits their business needs together with resources and actions to support the user in moving forward.
Results
ScenarioBuilder® makes structured processes easy to follow by creating, reviewing, publishing and managing guidance online. ScenarioBuilder® transforms a complex web of questions, answers and Iinputs iInto step-by-step paths to take effective action. Across Government and industry ScenarioBuilder® provides a suite of intuitive systems to support customers and staff meet business needs online - securely and in compliance with policies, regulations, standards and guidelines.
Business Victoria allows Victorian businesses to access vital business management resources and greatly reduce the administrative burden (and anxiety) of compliance. Customers benefit from resources spanning the whole of government in packages that tailor themselves to each individual's needs. Moreover, DIIRD is improving service provision dramatically as they significantly increase operating efficiency. ScenarioBuilder® has enabled the Victoria Government to deliver Business Victoria that helps small business to put in place quality processes because experts in those processes can easily capture process information to provide the best possible online guidance.
The user has the ability to share their saved progress with others. The Admin User can control user profiles; create new business units and much more.
User entered data determines the destination the user should reach. The rule illustrates the text box field and the destinations according to the selections that are made or the data that is entered.
