In just under a year as Boston’s chief executive, Mayor Marty Walsh has already made a positive and hopefully lasting impact on Boston. Picking up right where his predecessor, the late Mayor Menino, left off, Mayor Walsh has since implemented a number of arts and culture reboots, civic structural changes and continues to strive to make Boston the epicenter of small, large and innovative business. To accomplish the latter, he and his administration have attempted to overhaul a number of outdated aspects when it comes to permitting.

On Monday, the City of Boston will be announcing partnership with California-based Accela which offers community engagement and management solutions that can streamline the likes of Boston’s permitting process. A source close to the partnership confirmed that Boston selected Accela as its partner to modernize the City’s licensing and permitting systems.

By doing this, cogs in the municipal machine will continue to turn and make it more enticing for businesses to plant their roots in city limits.

“We’ve already made deep improvements to the way the public does business with the City by taking steps to streamline and improve licensing and permitting operations, but there’s always more to be done,” said Mayor Walsh in a statement. “This partnership with Accela and OpenCounter will take us further, creating a coordinated and seamless experience across departments for residents and business owners seeking permitting and licensing through the City.”

“This has been a remarkable year for Accela. We’ve significantly added to our installed base, rolled out new solutions and continue to build out the Civic Platform,” said Maury Blackman, Accela CEO and President, in a statement. “The energy and enthusiasm we see every day, from citizens and developers to our colleagues in government, makes us confident that the momentum we built together in 2014 will lead to a game-changing year across the government technology landscape in 2015.”

Accela’s civic platform works in tandem with CivicData.com to further open-source city data, an initiative Mayor Walsh and his team are also perfecting at present. In a world where records, licenses and procedures are increasingly undertaken and made available online, Accela will help provide a smoother and more concise user-experience to Bostonians.

The City of Boston notes that Accela’s technology “will work across departments to assist in coordinating workflow, integrating a variety of backend systems, and providing an improved public experience that still maintains the rules created to protect public health and safety.”

Even better is that Accela’s product allows for a two-way conversation. The city will be able to dictate a silky permitting process while citizens can also use mobile apps to engage with the government on how to further improve and collaborate on permitting.

The city expects the first phase of the Accela partnership to be deployed in roughly six-months with updates occurring over a two-year periods subsequently.

The hope is that news businesses and startups will be able to use publicly available civic data, expedited through an online permit process, to build new apps and companies not otherwise privy to this kind of information.

Last fall, the Department of Innovation and Technology and the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics guided developers through Boston’s inaugural civic hackathon, aptly called HubHacks, to make licenses and permits more accessible.

The event yielded the following three winners:

• City of Boston Official Address Search, which, utilizing services provided by the City’s Master Address Database, allows users to look up their address with text- or map-based search capabilities;
•  Online Street Occupancy, an electronic, web-based form designed to replace the in-person, manual process that currently involves multiple departments at City Hall;
•  Permit Me Boston, a website that enables an applicant to find their permit status online, as well as retrieve any necessary contact information.

Though perhaps not the sexiest services, the three HubHacks champions will do much to help ease the aches and pains that come with trying to obtain the right authorization for any endeavor. And if Mayor Walsh plans on hosting more iterations of HubHacks in the future, surely all of them combined will be a paperwork godsend.

Plenty of other cities have already teamed up with Accela for municipal purposes. The platform gave way to greater efficiency in developments and inspections in Omaha, Nebraska which was especially handy in April 2013 when the city recorded 6,000 online permits.

Baltimore, Maryland projected upwards of $900,000 in savings from infrastructure and street-level improvements from using Accela in their first year as a team.

Stay tuned to BostInno for more information and specifics about the partnership between the City of Boston and Accela.