LED Moves Into the FASTLANE

Louisiana’s economy is moving forward with a mix of business incentives and benefits developed and administered by Louisiana Economic Development.

Led by Secretary of Economic Development Michael J. Olivier, innovative and aggressive approaches have been created and implemented and are now being administered by his department. At Secretary Olivier’s direction, existing internal management systems are being re-engineered to meet the new dynamics created by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Upgrading Management Systems

One such program is known internally as LEDPro. Sharon Perez, Undersecretary of Management and Finance, has overall responsibility for upgrading the Department’s management systems. Under her guidance, LEDPro is being re-engineered by Technology Engineers to better support the LED team of economic development professionals. The re-engineered system is scheduled to begin beta testing in late August or early September.

Part of the re-engineering and support effort for LEDPro is to re-brand it as FASTLANE. This evokes an image more consistent with the Louisiana Forward campaign by LED, and the name highlights the streamlined functionality and performance of the re-engineered system.

FASTLANE will keep many of the features of LEDPro (as well as LEDPro’s predecessor BI-Apps) to ensure continuity. For example, the re-engineered system will retain its database (SQL Sever 2000) and Microsoft Development System (Visual Studio), which currently uses ASP.NET only. In addition, FASTLANE will use VB.NET for administrator interface design.

Perez believes FASTLANE “will give us the internal tools we need to keep pace with the vigorous growth we anticipate as Louisiana’s economy responds to the programs advocated and implemented by Governor Blanco and Secretary Olivier. Since we need these tools quickly, adapting new technologies to existing components is the most cost-effective approach with the shortest time to completion.”

New Features

Other new features to be introduced into the FASTLANE system are creation and manipulation of Microsoft Word objects within the Visual Basic code; cleaner, better performing interfaces; and more table-driven, user-maintained reference tables.

Other innovative initiatives that Technology Engineers is working on with LED are the Small Entrepreneurship Certification (Hudson Initiative) system and the Small and Emerging Business Development system. Both systems are browser-based, permitting small businesses and entrepreneurs to become certified by applying directly for incentives and benefits over the Internet.

“These two systems reduce our internal support costs while increasing the availability of incentives to those who need them,” Perez said. “It’s the way business is done these days. We preach it to business and industry, and we are practicing what we preach.”