BUSINESS EXPANSION

A new platform to host licensing and enforcement information called SMARTGOV has been chosen by the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board (WSLCB), for both the cannabis and alcohol markets. Applications for permits and licenses will now go through SMARTGOV’s cloud-based hosted service, which will make the time to process such applications must faster, according to a recent release by the Paladin Data Systems, which created SMARTGOV. In turn, it will give citizens, applicants and staff the ability to participate in and engage with the application process as a whole, from beginning to end.

The CEO of Paladin, Jim Nall, explained how the public will benefit from this service. “SMARTGOV empowers applicants to become active participants in the permitting and licensing process, providing all of our citizens with information transparency,” Nall stated.

The WSLCB’s previous hosted application processing service was not able to accommodate the higher demand of processing since the state’s legalized cannabis industry began back in 2014.

Ed Hallda is the Vice President of Strategic Development at Paladin, and he shared how the technology behind SMARTGOV will aid with the WSLCB’s urgent timeline. “The SMARTGOV design takes advantage of modern cloud technologies on Amazon Web Services,” Hallda stated. “This provides WSLCB with on-demand scaling, high availability, unlimited secure storage, increased agility and minimal capital expenditures.” He continued to explain how utilizing this platform will enable the WSLCB to spend more time working with customers instead of having to fuss with its processing system.

In an exclusive interview, CULTURE got into contact with Kim Brooks, Marketing Director of Paladin Data Systems and SMARTGOV, who shared more about how the new process will affect the state. “The scope of this project includes cannabis as well as liquor, which makes it a larger project with a lot of stakeholders—stores, bars, and restaurants with liquor licenses will be helped by this, too, as well as cannabis growers and retailers. The impact of streamlining these processes is pretty big, once you include the full range of the business licensing involved,” Brooks told CULTURE.

Washington is definitely not the first jurisdiction to utilize the cutting-edge services of SMARTGOV. In fact, there are more than 100 jurisdictions in America that have switched over to the SMARTGOV platform. This has led them to processing more than 280,000 different permits and licenses—a very helpful technology-based storage and operating system

The WSLCB will begin utilizing SMARTGOV in 2017.