Maryland sees uptick in online business filings

To encourage entrepreneurship, make it easier to start a business.
It may sound simple enough, but it’s a principle that is guiding the state of Maryland’s IT department.
The state reworked the process for registering a business, now a one-stop shop called Maryland Business Express.
Writing in GCN, Maryland Information Technology Secretary David Garcia and Janet Grard, of state-contracted information services firm NIC, Inc., detail how the state streamlined the process of registering a business and created an online portal.

Today, business owners enter universal business data about their companies only once, and the data automatically populates across all other agency forms that require the same information. From this single portal, an entrepreneur can register a business, quickly search for and register trade names and establish tax accounts.

For the fiscal year ending June 30, more than half of new Maryland businesses registered online. That’s up from 17 percent in 2013, according to the report.
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Having an online portal makes it easier, but the article shows how that is a result of the process itself. The very human work of coordinating between at least five different government agencies with previously overlapping functions had to be in place for things to change.
A focus on serving customers helped, as well as support from Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration, the pair writes.