SNB is a Crown Corporation³ owned by the Province of New Brunswick. Crown corporations are publicly owned and are operated much as private sector companies. SNB is financially self-sufficient and revenue oriented, has its own President and an independent board of directors. While it continues to receive a level of funding from the Province for certain “core services”, increasingly it is reliant on its own source revenues including direct charges for services, fees, and subscriptions.

Crown corporations play an integral part in Canada’s social, political, and economic landscape. They are set up by government, but operate more as private or independent companies. Canada’s Crown corporations are relatively independent of government control and therefore, have a greater degree of freedom compared to government ministries. The heads of many crown corporations are appointed, as is the President of SNB, but this does not limit their ability to operate largely at “arms length” from government.

The SNB Board of Directors has two committees; the audit committee and the development committee. In addition SNB’s operations are supported by a series of advisory committees, and working groups comprised of SNB employees. The Business Advisory Group (BAG), for example, examines new project and investment opportunities and makes recommendations to the Board about those opportunities.

As the main service delivery agency for the Government of New Brunswick, SNB’s main objectives are to: In fiscal year 2004-05, SNB had about 641 employees delivering around 270 services to citizens on behalf of a number of provincial government departments, municipalities, and public utilities. SNB employees are providing services to customers in 36 different communities. About 160 or 25% of SNB employees are employed in the main offices in eight functional areas: human resources, corporate counsel, operational support, sales, marketing and communications, corporate strategy, corporate services and systems development. The remaining 481 employees or 75% are located in the community-based, public service delivery facilities.

The growth and success of SNB can be traced back, in part, to the flexibilities it is afforded by virtue of being a crown corporation. The traditional challenges facing public sector innovation such as limits on discretion in terms of setting priorities, hiring, and budgeting are not issues in the same way for SNB. The story of the corporate registry, in particular, illustrates these flexibilities.

In 2000, as part of a government reorganization, the Corporate Registry (CR) was moved from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to SNB. While operating as part of the DOJ the CR team faced a number of issues limiting their ability to move forward in their service offerings. First, the program was very low in the priority list against competing programs such as public prosecution, and court administration. Secondly, there was limited internal expertise and interest in transforming traditional services programs to new web-based service offerings. In addition Provincial requirements that public access databases be rendered in a fully bilingual manner were insurmountable with DOJ’s existing technical infrastructure.

SNB had experience in managing registry programs through its real property and personal property registries and the management of the CR had begun to see the advantages technologies available in SNB might hold for the registry. SNB executives were interested in getting the CR brought into SNB as well, based on familiarity and potential synergies with the other registries. They looked forward to the challenge of modernizing the CR for the public benefit, balanced with the potential political and budgetary challenges of having it.

SNB general management and CR unit management were collectively willing to take a “just do it” attitude; they looked at providing public access to the CR database as a quick hit initiative to the overall modernization of the Registry. The quick hit philosophy is part of SNB culture, guided by the perspective that the public should be able to see a difference in service quality and/or products early on any modernization project. Within three months of the actual physical move of the CR to SNB, public Internet access to the CR database was operational. This type of accelerated timeline would not have been possible without SNB’s expertise in project management and Internet applications. SNB had allocated $100,000 to the quick hit initiative and the planning for the business registry project, including modernization of the CR. SNB was able to absorb the development and ongoing maintenance costs of the public access initiative within normal budgetary processes.

The public responded favorably to the new service. In relation to hits or visits to the database, it experienced 150% growth rate over a three year period. This helped to reduce and/or stabilize telephone inquiries into the CR for information from the database. One matter that was debated within SNB was whether public access to the CR database would carry a fee or not. The decision was made to provide free access in order to reduce the complexity and timelines for the quick hit and create an environment for customer take-up. It was acknowledged that the matter would likely get revisited in the future and that some customer and political concerns would likely arise in moving from a free access to a fee access process.

By 2004, fiscal reality both from the provincial government and SNB perspectives created a need to revisit this issue. For some time SNB had been in favor of implementing a charging model for corporate registry information. All of SNB’s registries except this one had a fee associated with access, therefore this change would bring consistency to its management and fee model. In addition, it would provide funds for enhancing CR functionality in areas such as e-filing and e-records and the potential to have fee-based value added information products.

In response SNB began to explore a fee-based model for access to the CR database by launching a “consultation tour” to assess the impact of introducing fees for a previously free service. Customers, i.e., users of the registry database, were found to be mostly willing to pay for the services made available through the enhanced registry web site. SNB also conducted an industry research study, evaluating market size, simulating different pricing policies, and assessing the volume of annual CR search transactions completed through different channels (phone, online). The business case with a one year payback period projected was approved.