Background:
The City of San Jose's Office of Economic Development (OED) is committed to a vital, competitive San Jose economy that increases prosperity for people and companies and enhances City revenues. The City provides a number of significant business support programs and found that their clients had a low level of awareness of the support services that were available to them.

Need:
Business Community Development: The City needs to support and help grow the entrepreneurial sector making sure that entrepreneurs are ready to get into business and that the people already in business could increase their growth potential. The City has Business support facilities but was looking to expand that support through the web.

Solutions:
Business Community: The City elected to use the Assessment Models that had been developed and deployed internationally. They used the web based assessment tools for Entrepreneurship readiness and Business Fitness to firstly conduct workshops for groups of businesses and for web based self assessment on their Business support website. They monitor the business assessments using Assessment Manager so that they know who is seeking business support and are evaluating the overall needs of the industry through Dashboard.

The City has also successfully deployed QLBS in the Non Profit sector where it realized that with the economic downturn also affecting the performances of Non Profit communities, it is increasingly important to offer them performance improvement services.

QLBS has developed a program using their technology to engage and improve the performances of the San Jose Business communities and the Non Profit organizations. Their software and processes are to the best of our knowledge unique in providing a “universal measurement tool that can assist in change management and performance improvement of any organization and community”

Jeff Ruster, Deputy Director, Office of Economic Development, City of San Jose