BC Registries and Online Services has started a phased, multi-year modernization initiative. Their objective is to replace and improve the applications used for the Corporate, Personal Property and Manufactured Homes Registries. 

The project is driven by the bold vision of BC ROS: to develop a better service experience and make it easier for citizens and businesses to complete transactions and filings across BC and other jurisdictions. The Ministry of Citizens’ Services procured a team composed of resources from FreshWorks Studio, CGI, Daxiom, and Openfield Canada to collaborate with BC Registries on modernization. The team has recently delivered the first applications in the project roadmap. We are grateful to be part of such a wonderful team that has prioritized collaboration from the start of the initiative. 

The multi-year modernization initiative began in 2018 and will continue into 2021. This is because there are 10 applications which will be modernized or replaced. The applications support business registration for 10 different entity types:

• Limited Company
• Community Contribution Company
• Unlimited Liability Company
• Benefit Company
• General Partnership
• Limited Partnership
• Sole Proprietorship
• Limited Liability Partnership
• Cooperative Association
• Credit Unions

Each different entity type has their own unique set of requirements for the different applications to support them. Fortunately, the team is ensuring a more user-oriented system than currently exists by engaging with many stakeholders and thousands of different users of the system to ensure the resulting solutions are excellent.

Working in tandem to support existing processes where necessary, the software allows for easy registration of businesses. This allows the Ministry to keep an up to date, accurate record of all the businesses in BC. The results have been immediately realized in saving time and energy for everyone – the BC Government, it’s public servants, and the citizens they support.

 Legacy Data

Over the years, the process for different entity types (corporations, cooperatives, credit unions etc.) have modernized at different rates – resulting in multiple legacy systems. For example, the legacy mainframe database holds data for cooperatives – but for other entity types the data was held in  separate databases.

  Legislative Requirements and Knowledge

Each software or process change had to meet the legislated requirements. Thus, the team has become subject matter experts on 7 different pieces of government legislation in order to make sure that requirements were met before spending time on any given feature. The staff at BC ROS made this process seamless, providing our team with direction and the needed expertise at every touchpoint. 

  Organizational Change Management

BC Registry Services staff had processes set in place that were based on the legacy system. Each system adjustment would require change management efforts from the Ministry to adapt to the new software. With the help of the BC ROS team, we worked hard to modernize the system while embedding the change process as part of the team’s functional responsibilities. 

This meant we were able to more easily absorb the impact of changes as they happened. For example, our product releases were strategically scheduled among other program releases to reduce the impact on the registry staff. The team also supported change management for staff by creating job aids, providing product demos, and collaborating with users.

  User Base Complexity (different needs)

BC Registry Services supports a complex user base with distinctly different needs. For example, the majority of the business transactions are completed by just a few law firms (paralegals, corporate supervisors, lawyers) who are supporting residents in their business registration and filing. 

The other set of remaining users (ie. the general public) use the system on their own for different business transactions. The number of users from the general public is substantially higher compared to law firms. However, the amount of business transactions completed by the general public is lower. As such, a notable challenge was designing a system to serve both user groups equally.

  Easy, Quick and Secure Access to Registry Services

Supporting all businesses – from small to large enterprise organizations – is a critical value driver for BC’s economy. It is important to the Ministry that there are no barriers to business registration and clients are well supported in their journey over time

Our service design practice at FreshWorks aims to ensure that solutions are always human centered. We consider the needs of users from all walks of life making services usable by people with the widest range of abilities, and in the widest range of situations.

  Increased Compliance and Satisfaction with Services

The Registries needed to actively track and manage citizen information, actions, timeline, status and outcomes so that the business community and citizens can be informed and aware of upcoming changes which affect them.

  A Scalable and Secure Foundation

Business and legislative requirements are constantly changing and it was important that changes could be rapidly addressed. As part of their vision for a scalable and secure foundation, it was clear the system needed to be able to respond quickly and easily to new demands.  

  Improved Operability and Security

The Registries require robust and secure authentication and payment methods to ensure that the data could be integrated and shared between multiple programs and systems.

Before getting started, the team sat down and discussed the pain points BC Registry Services faced. Based on these insights, the team provided a set of recommendations for how the project could successfully proceed in an agile manner. Our processes have been refined after years of hard work and experience with app development projects. We follow agile development standards where our entire team participates in daily standups, sprint planning, and backlog grooming. After outlining the key requirements, the entire team got to work.

Disciplined Agile / Scaled Agile Approach 

The team followed a disciplined agile approach, borrowing aspects of program management from SAFE (Scaled Agile Framework). This meant adjusting the team composition, roles, responsibilities and meeting practices so that BC Registry Services could adopt a more agile way of working. One of the key roles which was embedded in the team was “Release Train Engineer”. The team needed a role that had a comprehensive understanding of how to scale Lean and Agile practices. This role was identified by the BC ROS team, who helped develop and outline the criteria. The role needed to be equipped with an awareness of the unique opportunities and challenges involved in a large development environment. This role has been the key to manage risks, escalate impediments, confirm value delivery, and assist in driving consistent improvement.

By working in an agile manner and incorporating user feedback, the team delivered a responsive web-based application that feeds into a consolidated database. The application has a clean, modern user interface that makes it easier for both citizens and businesses to complete registrations with the province of BC and across other jurisdictions and manage accounts.

This project is ongoing and will continue to add features to support the province’s modernization initiatives. Our team tackled lower-traffic modules first, followed by modules that were currently undergoing legislative change (ie. benefit companies). 

Below are some of the features that have been developed thus far:

The Province is very happy with the solution so far, including the implementation of release management plans across teams as well as the increase in change management within BC Registry Services.

Recently, John Horgan announced that a new kind of business registration would be possible – Benefit Companies. The team was able to mobilize and release the features to allow the incorporation of benefit companies on the new BC Registry Services website.

The system was developed with a stack of technologies that were chosen based on Ministry requirements. For example, the Ministry required open source, modern technologies that would allow them to grow and change with time. 

• BC Gov Openshift –  open source container platform that government application development teams use to develop and deploy modern, cloud native software applications. 
• Postgres DB – open source database focused on data integrity and security. 
• Vue.js – open source Javascript framework to build a beautiful user interface. 
• NATS – utilized as an open source, high performance messaging system. 
• Kubernetes Cron – implemented to allow for scheduled jobs.
• Python – all backend services are written in Python.
• Flask (Python) API – lightweight web application framework for RESTful API development.  
• Github Actions – allows code to be built, tested, and deployed right from Github.
• KeyCloak – Keycloak is used as an identity provider brokering platform and high level access management (roles) and overall application security.
• Sentry – Being used for exception alerting and tracking
• Prometheus – Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system
• 1password – digital vault to store the secrets our application uses

We are still working on enhancing the application and adding more features. 

Some features coming up..

1. Enable other entity types to “alter” to a benefit company through an online form
2. Allow users to file “corrections” to their company information
3. Build a simple and intuitive company profile, so users can update their company information in one place instead of through a variety of different complicated forms.