Phila.gov/business launches phase two, featuring ‘Business Assistant’ wizard

Mayor Nutter unveils the next rollout of Phila.gov/business Thursday at the Community College of Philadelphia. Photo courtesy of Kait Privitera.

Mayor Nutter officially unveiled Thursday phase two of an effort to overhaul the business services portal on Phila.gov.

If you’re surprised by the continued development of Phila.gov/business ahead of an on-going site-wide redesign effort, then you might also marvel at the fact that the project landed on time from an internal deadline Technically Philly reported on in June, despite the start and stop of the overall Phila.gov refresh.

Visit the new business portal here: Phila.gov/business.

The city is trumpeting the ‘Business Assistant’ wizard, which is meant to walk new businesses through the online process of meeting city license and compliance requirements. Additional web access to permits and applications was another big goal for the project. In September, the wizard soft launched and, since then, some 720 users have registered and half have sought information on business, a press release said.

How widely used the portal will be will test the effort’s success. This multi-agency effort lands as other portions of Phila.gov are being recast. Internal deadlines for that project have varied.

Phila.gov business services portal to add 75% of licenses and permit applications online by 2012, interactivity

Before its second birthday in November, the City of Philadelphia’s Business Services Center website will add more interactivity and have the majority of licenses and permits available, officials tell Technically Philly.

“The portal was the first step in the overhaul of Phila.gov, collecting and sharing all business-related information for business users, rather than asking them to hunt through multiple departmental sites to get what they need,” said Sara Merriman, the director of policy initiatives for the city’s Department of Commerce.

The next release of the portal, internally scheduled for late summer, will include three major ‘interactive’ features: (1) a wizard tool to help direct businesses to the licenses they may need, (2) a wizard output into a dashboard that users can save and return to as they work through their tasks and (3) a business registration feature that will in future releases be used as the basis for further interactivity like online permit delivery and payment tracking, Merriman said.

In addition to the added interactivity, by the end of 2011, the portal is planned to house most city license and permit applications.

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Where’s the data? A ten year old problem, city CTO says

For all the city information technology issues that Allan Frank addresses daily, its perhaps the availability of transparent city data that plagues him most publicly.

Sure, IT consolidation efforts mandated by mayoral executive order — which have transformed the Division of Technology from an agency once one-fifth the size it is now — have been a priority for Frank, the city’s Chief Technology Officer.

But often, the cry from the city’s industrious technology community has been one caused by a national intrigue in government transparency that tech can facilitate.

Cities like New York — which opened an impressive amount of city datasets for public use, and sponsored a $20,000 contest to attract software developers to create interesting technology applications and web apps — are pressing ahead with new data initiatives.

But Philadelphia lags behind. The city’s first big data win came when SEPTA released raw data around station geolocation and schedules, well after developers took their own stab at collecting data — by scraping HTML pages. Since, we’ve seen little movement from either developers or the city.

When we first covered Frank in May last year, he spoke before a crowd of Refresh Philly attendees and gave them a charge to come up with data they wanted. The effort dwindled, due in part to a lack of movement in the community and too, on actionable steps from the city.

Now, as Frank enters his first fiscal year with a serious $120 million capital investment in city technology, we’re wondering what’s next.

Late last week, we met with the CTO to discuss problems plaguing the department around opening those datasets and followed-up with Frank about how things have been for the last year, his first in public office. After the jump, that conversation.

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Ten Philadelphia competitors and their January Web traffic

Click to enlarge.

Perhaps one of the most influential realities of the Web is metrics. The details of traffic and audience online have so rapidly become expansive that they have likely not yet been entirely harnessed.

Arguments still rage around the accuracy and importance of a myriad of Web analytics, but, away from page views, an increasing standard is to compare sites by their monthly unique visitors, though that number’s efficacy has no doubt come into question.

Until now, very little attention has been paid publicly to comparing Philadelphia’s many competitors by way of traffic comparison. With the first numbers for 2010 released this month by public Web analytics company Compete, Technically Philly decided to compile the first such digest.

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