Oklahoma One-Stop Business Registration System
What’s the most amazing project I’ve worked on?
The state of Oklahoma passed legislation in 2007. This legislation said that the Department of Commerce would be responsible for building an application that would allow any business or person to register their business with the state of Oklahoma. This was ambitious legislation with hopes of bringing all state agencies together in one, centralized online presence.
The first attempt was not well executed since the only thing in Commerce’s budget would allow for only an upgrade to an existing, internal system. This system did not integrate with any other state agencies and would not accomplish anything new.
After a couple of years of working with different state agencies and not getting anywhere, I was started to realize this would be a very long process. Still, though, 2010 arrived before I knew it and no progress. While there had been a number of attempts to get something worked out, nothing ever took hold. If it wasn’t a problem with the Commerce budget, there was a problem with the number of other agencies. I finally came up with a solution. I designed a system that was modeled off OAuth’s API. I didn’t use OAuth since I didn’t need that much complexity, so I designed my own API. I system I designed and built allowed for:
- User account setup
- Select the type of business they wish to license
- Display a pre-determined list of questions/answers based on the business type selected
- Display the appropriate license based on answers given
- Link the user to the license on the agency’s network (remember, all agencies have their own systems)
- That agency could make an API call to the business registration system, requesting the individual’s busines information (name, address, type of business and license needed to fulfill the request)
- Upon completion of the license in that agency’s system, that agency could make an API call updating business registration system, the user’s progress in the registration process
Because of legislation passed in 2011, for FY2012, the responsibility of the business registration system was passed from Commerce to the Office of State Finance. Due to these changes, the work was to be scrapped and none of the code to be used since OSF had no in-house developers to handle the support for it.
Because the work was abandoned, I’ve made a copy of the API documentation I built for the other agencies to use.