The Business Development unit meets regularly with all service delivery partners, primarily departments and municipalities, to keep in touch with both existing service relationships and possible new opportunities. An SNB team meets regularly with all partners in what is essentially a “tour.” The team tours all agencies with existing agreements as well as potential partners that provide service delivery to the public, to talk about the next level of services and listen to the concerns of agency staff. “We make an appointment with them and we go and meet with them.” The tours enable a communication of concerns; concerns which often go beyond service delivery itself. Concerns about costs, about losing the ability to deliver services directly, losing resources, and losing staff are often the focus of these discussions. The tour enables SNB to engage directly with agency staff on the commitment to delivering public value and to make the point that the question of who delivers that value is less important than the delivery itself. The tours also include more operational level discussions of business requirements and costs. These discussions enable SNB to craft proposals back to agencies about how partnering with SNB will allow an agency to meet its service objectives, or even in some cases, to “push the envelop beyond those objectives.”

During the tours SNB gathers information from agencies about performance goals and mechanisms for tracking performance against those goals. This information, when it is available, is used as part of the proposal process. SNB seeks information about service performance measures, customer satisfaction ratings, error rates, and costs. Most often agencies are not able to provide this information; most agencies, SNB has found, seldom have established standards for their own performance nor have they developed evaluation processes to determine if they have achieved their performance goals. Further, service delivery costs are rarely fully tracked. SNB is compelled, because of its requirement of financial sustainability, to be very clear about its costs. “We’ve come up with a fairly comprehensive estimate—we don’t have any choice; we’re a business. If we charge a department two dollars and our cost is $3.50, it won’t be long before it’s going to drain us as a corporation, so we really have to understand all of our costs.”

In some cases, the tour launches SNB and an agency into conversations about a formal agreement, in other cases it doesn’t. The conversations that do get launched play out over time and involve a give and take between SNB and the agency. The give and take includes detailed discussions about the current agency costs, projected SNB costs, as well as the development of associated service standards and Service Level Agreements (SLA). SLAs represent another area where SNB leverages existing investments. Each service agreement with an agency is formalized through an SLA; SLAs for new offerings are generally modifications of the most relevant from among existing agreements.

Understanding resistance to the idea of transitioning service responsibility to SNB and responding to it, is also part of the conversation. Often resistance to a service agreement with SNB comes from agencies believing that their costs are less than they actually are. SNB will work with departments to develop more detailed cost estimates. Once full costs are accounted for the SNB service model usually competes very well with agency models.