The next big Web project at the State Treasurer's Office is a one-stop portal where businesses can search for available economic incentives all in one place.
The project, called the California Business Internet Gateway (C-BIG), should go live by the end of 2016, said Jan Ross, the state's deputy treasurer for technology and innovation.
The portal will be structured much like a retail, e-commerce website, Ross said during an interview with Techwire last month.
"If you go to Amazon and you're shopping for your kids for Christmas, you can put in their ages and their likes and it'll pop up several gifts that they may be interested in. In the same way, you can come to this website, you can put in your business — how many employees you have, what you're looking to do — and it will pop up all of the incentive programs that we offer that align with that," Ross said.
Today, those incentives, which include tax credits, loans and bonds, are scattered across the individual websites of 14 boards, commissions and authorities under the treasurer's oversight. They include institutions such as the California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority, the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee and the Scholarshare Investment Board.
C-BIG might be complementary to the California Business Portal, a one-stop website the Department of Technology and Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development launched in 2015 that's designed to make it easier for new and existing businesses to get the information they need to get off the ground and grow.
The portal, at www.BusinessPortal.ca.gov, consolidates information about business registration, licensing and permitting, tax credits and incentive programs, and other topics that were previously only available on separate, siloed Web pages.
Last fall the State Treasurer's Office launched a new website called DebtWatch for data about the state's debt. Ross also is overseeing an alternative procurement approach for the modernization of the state's Debt Management System.
