Businesses in the City can interact with a variety of different departments, from the Oakland Business Assistance Center to the zoning counter and building counter to the business licensing office. How can we make all the processes a business goes through easier to navigate, for both established businesses and first-time entrepreneurs?

Please vote for your favorite strategy, and leave a comment on why you like or don't like any of these strategies. Or give us your ideas for strategies that will make Oakland's business processes easier to navigate.

 

Marisa Raya, Economic Development Strategy Project Manager about 9 years ago

The Economic Development Strategy could provide a platform for different city departments to review service delivery processes and establish performance metrics.

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Jay Ashford almost 9 years ago

You may want to look into investing in a BPMS (Business Process Management Suite) platform, many of which are available as either on-premise software systems, or as cloud-based applications. These types of systems allow you to map out and configure your business processes within the application to meet your business needs, and then publish those processes in the application. Once published, the application will provide a working system for employees to manage their day to day business processes, and will provide useful metrics such as cycle times, % of exception paths taken, etc.

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Marisa Raya, Economic Development Strategy Project Manager almost 9 years ago

Thanks Jay!

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Jay Ashford almost 9 years ago

If you don't want to go the software route, at a minimum, it would also be helpful to have a business analyst (or business architect) work with each department to create UML-style system use case diagrams (see example: http://www.uml-diagrams.org/use-case-diagrams-examples.html) for each department, that would list out: 1) who are the external actors that interface with each department, 2) what are the primary use cases (functions) provided by the department, and 3) who are the internal actors (employees) who perform those use cases. Then have departments share and review their use case diagrams with other city departments. In doing such an exercise, I've seen many organizations that are surprised to find out how much overlap and redundancy there is across departments, in terms of the functions they perform, and the external actors they interact with.

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