State of Delaware Division of Corporations

Every year more than 100,000 new businesses choose Delaware as their corporate home due to their modern and flexible corporate laws, highly-respected Court of Chancery, business-friendly state government and service-oriented staff. The State of Delaware Division of Corporations is responsible for recording and maintaining important business and corporate data and collecting fees and franchise taxes from these businesses. The Division of Corporations collects over $850 million in revenue for the state, which is the second largest collection of revenue from any state agency and is approximately 30% of the general fund revenue collected by the State of Delaware. The Division processed more than 650,000 web-based transactions in 2010. The efficiency and effectiveness of the Division of Corporations’ operations is mission critical to both the business community and state finances.

Challenge

The State of Delaware Division of Corporations’ major challenge was the ability of 3 disparate applications to cohesively operate across a single business process. Over the years, a mainframe application, an imaging application and web-based application were created to match the high level of customer service provided by the Division. Due to the technology limitations and age of those technologies, the overall platform became difficult to manage and even more difficult to adapt to the ever changing legislation. Also, connectivity challenges and the disbursed nature of the data resulted in reporting limitations. Alliance was brought in to develop a new integrated platform that would take advantage of the new technologies and deliver more timely innovative services to the Division’s customers.

SOLUTION
Alliance leveraged a commercially available application to provide a set of core services (image management, workflow management, business process intelligence, security and user rights management, business activity monitoring) as the foundation for the solution. Leveraging the available APIs, Alliance created custom rules, fee engines and package distribution engines while maintaining the integrity of the core solution. The rules-based system facilitates a workflow process focused on customer care. More importantly, the rules engine was designed to handle the various exceptions that are present within the state laws making this system flexible and cost effective to support.

The integrated and scalable platform integrates payment processing and document management (packaging and distribution) through various channels including BTB XML, print, scan and fax. Alliance created the rules and fee engines that allow for flexibility and easy configuration while maximizing performance and maintainability. Reporting and analytics are provided through an integrated data warehouse utilizing a separate synchronized database to maintain core processing performance.

IMPACT
Published in their 2010 Annual Report, “The Delaware Division of Corporations is progressing steadily in the development of its new web-based Integrated Corporation Information System (ICIS). This system will make use of new underlying technology to power the Division’s applications, ultimately improving the services provided to the Division’s customers and stakeholders.” Further impact:

• Polished user experience with configurable user interfaces based on business process requirements
• Accurate operational and analytical reporting
• Enhanced customer experience with advanced user interface and workflow for document imaging
• Improved operational efficiency
• Significant reduction in time needed for user training

WHY ALLIANCE

The Division of Corporations chose Alliance because of our ability to quickly learn their business, which was critical to implementing the solution. Alliance also specializes in helping governments and companies without a strong technical background to harness new technologies to ultimately do business better and provide a seamless customer experience. Lastly, Alliance has a strong record of innovating software platforms that directly drive revenue. All of these strengths fit with the Division’s goals.