Online Corporate Renewal Project

-- by Sue Fleener, Information Services Assistant Director, Department of Licensing

In 2001, legislation passed that enabled corporations and limited liability companies to file annual reports and renew their licenses online for the first time. (Customers can pay annual report and renewal fees with a credit card.) Historically, these documents filed with the Secretary of State's Office had to be typewritten and signed by specified officers of the company and accompanied by duplicates. Now, these organizations are able to log onto the Department of Licensing's website and file renewals with a simple click of a button. To date, more than 1,300 businesses have enjoyed this new service with enormous success.

The vision of the Online Corporation Renewal project was to "build an application that allows profit corporations and limited liability companies that are registered with the Washington Secretary of State to file their annual report and renew their legal entity license over the Internet using a credit card".

Online Corporate Renewals are part of Washington Governor Gary Locke's Digital Government Strategy.

This was a joint project with the Secretary of State.

The team members were:

From DOL:

Alan Rathbun, Nancy Skewis, Clyde Zahn, Mark Bockhorst, Kristin Halverstadt, John Foulkes (Project Manager), Susan McRae, Holly Burch, Chris Sedgwick, Karen Gerrits

Contractors from Logical:

Dan Remy, Steve Campbell, Corina McCleary, Ron McKay, Jake Kiehl, Susan Curtwright, Patt Dronen, Amy Hafen

From Secretary of State:

Mike Ricchio, Bill Kellington, Dawn Swanstrom

The project began in January, and was completed on schedule June 11, 2001.

This project used some of the components from the MLS-IPO project. The Revenue In Process (RIP) and the CyberSource Credit Card Engine saved the team 2.5 months of development and testing time at a total contractor cost of approximately $112,000. The RIP and Cybersource application components were also used by the Motor Vehicle Tabs project as common IPO components.

Corporate Renewals was designed and constructed using the same Architecture and technology development components as the MLS-IPO project. The only difference in the projects was the use of the MQ Series middleware to access records from the legacy database and bring them to the Web presentation layer for validation/action by the client.

The team had to overcome several challenges.

• The team needed to obtain legislative approval for accepting electronic filings of annual reports without signatures. They did this by drafting legislation (Z-0407.1) requested by the Secretary of State. The draft legislation received sponsorship from Representatives Conway and Clements.
  
  The essence of the bill (SHB1501) was to enable the Secretary of State to receive electronic filings of initial and annual reports for Corporations and Limited Liability Companies. The electronic filing of annual reports is a required part of the Internet IPO renewal process. Without this capability, the Internet renewal process could not legally be completed and these business entities would have to continue to renew via the mail with enclosure of a hand signed annual report.
  
  
• The MQ Series setup - DIS had received and successfully installed the MQ Series middleware on the S390 IBM mainframe. DOL was the first customer to use this product in version 5.3 for NT. MQ Series is a mature and stable product but few organizations had implemented using a CICS/Natural/NT solution. This was new ground for DOL and we did not have experience beyond a 101 type class that focused primarily on the mainframe side of the product.
  
  DOL enlisted DIS and IBM as partners in making this product work in our environment. Without this partnership the project could not have met commitments to meet a June 11 go-live date.
  
  
• The team also needed to revamp some of the administrative business rules. Applicants are required to enter specific fields in the new application. The application will not allow them to submit unless all pertinent information is included. This increases the accuracy of submissions.
  
  
• Meeting the State and Agency web standards was a challenge because Secretary of State was adamant regarding selection of banner graphics and color palette for Web Pages layout for this jointly owned application. After negotiations the end product was very close to state and agency standards.
  
  The Information Services Board (ISB) recently (June 11) adopted state-wide common look and feel standards for all state agencies Web pages. Agencies have been directed to be compliant by December 2001. It will require minimal impact for the Corporate Renewals application to be in compliance by that date.
  
  

MQ Series required multi-faceted skill sets from several organizations in order to install and become operational. John Foulkes appointed Steve Campbell from Logical as the project prime for this effort. John Howe from DIS provided invaluable consulting services and advocacy within DIS to muster additional CICS resources to code and test a "trigger"program to start Natural. IBM Global Services provided consulting services to assist in installation of the NT side of MQ Series and develop "best practices" for installation and on-going support. Susan McRae and Chris Sedgwick worked to develop the Natural program, finding a sample program from another state that had done a similar installation.

All these folks from different agencies, divisions and companies worked tirelessly together as a seamless team in order to make MQ Series work in our environment and application. During the first two months of production MQ Series has performed flawlessly, and has exceeded our expectations for stability and performance.

MQ Series was identified early on as a major project risk. In retrospect, this portion of the project should have started at least one month earlier in the project schedule to provide sufficient contingency to insure the availability of this product in near production form for QA and User Acceptance Testing.

Having dedicated support from Bill Kellington and others from Secretary of State was crucial to this project's success. Bill was an active participant in requirement definition, design, testing, training and implementation. Their participation allowed us to meet project milestone dates and keep the lines of communication with Secretary of State open for review and approval of project deliverables.

DOL took the tack of being a "general contractor" to build this application. Each of the seven contractor positions went through the IS accelerated contracts process. With a "tight" project time schedule (six months) this required a huge effort to acquire and get the contractor team on-board and up to speed. It would have been better to do a fixed price acquisition as opposed to a time and materials approach. We were fortunate that Logical was the successful vendor for all seven of the contracts that were awarded for this project.

Weekly project Core Team meetings, that included contractors and Secretary of State, where open and frank discussions took place, proved invaluable in building trust and ensuring coordination of all aspects of the project took place. As a result, less than 5% of project milestones were not completed per the project plan and schedule.

I congratulate the DOL, Secretary of State and contractor team members for their work on this project. Like all projects it had its ups and downs. But the end result was worth it.