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The Future of www.business.gov

In early 1998, NPR Deputy Director Greg Woods knew the time had come to decide the site's fate. NPR no longer had funds in its budget designated to continue development of the Business Advisor. The original team was scattered. Jim Van Wert, while checking in on the health of the Business Advisor periodically, had moved on to another web effort focused on export trade. John Huang had left NPR for a private firm. Filling his position at the agency was Karen Freeman, who had a degree in economics and computer science as well as experience managing information technology projects.

Woods considered three possibilities for the site. The first of which was simply to let the site "go dark." The Business Advisor had already served several purposes. It had been the first of a growing number of governmental "gateway" sites that sought to present information in the same "customer-focused" manner. All of these were under the aegis of particular agencies, but the Business Advisor had also taught important lessons about planning interagency efforts, experience that Jim Van Wert was drawing on to develop his new project. Bibbens notes, "We actually saw changes in the way web sites were viewed and managed within agencies," among those that participated on the task force.

To give up on the Business Advisor was a blow to the vision of "reinvented" government that NPR hoped to foster. The fundamental idea of the business advisor was to launch a new way of streamlining government that would circumvent the need for additional bureaucracy. Freeman emphasizes, "We're not trying to create more government [by offering a "virtual department of business"] we're trying to create less government and make it simpler." Woods wondered whether the site could be rejuvenated, and if so, what changes might be necessary to fulfill the mandate of NPR.

Woods' second possibility was to transform the site into a fee-for-service operation, providing a revenue stream to maintain the site. He might approach Ken Rogers at Stat-USA to consider incorporating the Business Advisor within the Stat-USA offerings. Rogers says he estimated that the Business Advisor would require a core staff of 15 to 20, and that the success of the site would depend on two factors. The first was narrowing the focus of the Business Advisor to identify key audiences who would be willing to pony up for the services it provided. The second was the willingness of other agencies to provide consistent and constantly-updated information to maintain the currency of the site. The latter issue would inevitably bring up the question of the public's right to free information as well as the government's obligation to disseminate some types of information, such as regulations, broadly. Rogers notes:

There's always a philosophical question about whether the government should charge for its information or not. In some respects, like regulations, the government wants the regulations to be widely distributed so that the people who need to abide by them are aware of the regulations. You don't necessarily want to throw up an impediment to that by saying not only do you have to read the regulations, but you have to pay for them. In some respects, that's a conflicting message. But by the same token, if you do something that makes them more understandable or more convenient to use, maybe they should pay for that.

Finally, Woods considered discussing the possibility of transferring the site to the SBA once again. He knew that Jim Van Wert would serve as an able advocate of this approach with the new administrator. In effect, Van Wert had simply carved out one aspect of the Business Advisor, export trade, and was developing that to its fullest potential. Perhaps SBA would be willing to do the same with other sections of the site, so what was once a "one size fits all" Advisor could be tailored to different audiences within the business community.

The Business Advisor had already done its part to highlight the need for digital collaboration among agencies and to begin to mold the public face of electronic government. Whether it could continue to break new ground or even recapture the ground it had once held was no longer clear.

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