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An SBA Showcase?

While Van Wert and NPR were seeking true interagency collaboration, representatives from other agencies still tended to view the project as basically an SBA effort. Joe McKay, a team member who was at the time working with the General Service Administration's Regulatory Information Service Center, says, "We were really doing it for [the Small Business Administration], actually. They were being the showcase. It was considered their product from the beginning." McKay adds, "I don't feel that we got enough support out of them, both managerially and voluntarily." NPR's John Huang, who tried to encourage collegiality, notes, "It's difficult to ask one agency to take the lead on something like this and still have others feel like it's a truly objective interagency type of effort."

Van Wert even found it difficult to gain that support within his own agency. Not only were the majority of program managers in SBA unaware of the potential he saw in the Web, but those on the technical side came to view the Business Advisor as competing against their own efforts and sending people away from their site rather than attracting them to it. "From day one, the only person I could convince [at SBA] that this was worthwhile was the administrator," recalls Van Wert. Those running the agency web site at www.sba.gov felt that their homepage was already a Business Advisor of sorts. Van Wert's response was that while the SBA site provided valuable resources, "We're not IRS. We're not Social Security. We're not EPA. We don't link to a lot of those things from the SBA homepage that businesses also care about."

Representatives from other agencies also viewed the Business Advisor as competition. Terry Bibbens recalls that these feelings of territoriality became enough of a concern in the Fall of 1995 to prompt NPR to host a White House gathering of executive management to reinforce the importance of collegiality in such a collaborative enterprise. Bibbens recalls:

[NPR] invited about 150 very senior people, deputy secretary level, administrator-level people, to a White House event. The vice president and the head of the domestic policy for the vice president communicated why [the Business Advisor] was important and why [the White House] wanted their support to make sure that natural resistance was overcome within the agencies.

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