Customer Solution Case Study
/ Arizona Creates Flexible, Graphical, Stimulus-Funds Reporting Solution in Three Months
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Government—Regional/state
Customer Profile
The Arizona Governor’s Office of Economic Recovery was created in March 2009 to administer federal funds sent to Arizona state agencies and universities through the U.S. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
Business Situation
Arizona had six months to come up with a reporting system that would comply with ARRA requirements. The state wanted a flexible solution that it could use for other reporting needs.
Solution
The state deployed Microsoft Stimulus360, a data warehouse and reporting solution designed specifically for ARRA reporting needs.
Benefits
- Fast, cost-effective ARRA solution
- Easy tracking of stimulus funds
- Flexible reporting foundation
Aaron Sandeen, Deputy Director of IT, Arizona Governor’s Office of Economic Recovery
When the U.S. Government granted billions of dollars in economic stimulus funding in early 2009, every U.S. state that received funds had about six months to create a solution for reporting on stimulus-fund spending. The State of Arizona worked with InfoStrat, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to implement Microsoft Stimulus360, and had its reporting system up and running in just three months, ahead of the deadline. By using Stimulus360, Arizona has been able to automate the submission, integration, and graphical presentation of thousands of financial transactions. It can also accommodate federal and state policy changes as they arise. By displaying Stimulus360 reports on a public website, Arizona is providing complete financial transparency. Plus, the state can use Stimulus360 for other reporting and grant-management needs, eliminating the need to invest in and maintain other systems.
Situation
On February 17, 2009, the United States Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to stimulate the national economy. It provided more than U.S.$300 billion in potential funding for government organizations and government-related programs.
Although the funds were a welcome relief for many organizations, ARRA created an urgent and unprecedented need to manage, track, report, and provide transparency into how those funds were used. Both state and federal government officials had to produce quarterly reports that provided detailed accounting of fund disbursement and number of jobs created and retained through stimulus funding. They also had to provide public transparency of expenditures through stimulus-spending websites. The deadline for the first reports was tight: October 2009—less than six months after funds began flowing.
In Arizona, federal funds have been awarded to 24 state agencies and universities to date. Although the law allows either centralized or decentralized reporting—statewide rollups of expenditures or reports from individual organizations receiving funds—Arizona Governor Jan Brewer mandated a centralized reporting solution so that the state could ensure that all organizations were meeting ARRA requirements. She also wanted a reporting solution that could be used to manage other grant-funded projects in the state.
In March 2009, Governor Brewer established the Arizona Governor’s Office of Economic Recovery to manage the distribution and reporting of ARRA funds in Arizona. In June 2009, Office of Economic Recovery staff began to search for an ARRA reporting solution. “Funds were not released all at once,” says Matt Hanson, Assistant Director of Programs and Performance in the Arizona Office of Economic Recovery. “States were told that the quality of reporting on the first installment would be a key determinant as to whether they would receive additional funds, so there was a big incentive to get it right.”
Solution
The Arizona Governor’s Office of Economic Recovery looked at various ARRA reporting solutions. Key selection criteria include cost, flexibility, ease of use, and support. “The federal government changed the reporting data model constantly between March and June 2009, so we needed a solution that could accommodate changes on the fly,” says Kiran Chinnagangannagari, IT Manager for the Arizona Department of Administration.
Familiar, Flexible Solution
The state ultimately selected Microsoft Stimulus360, a data warehouse and reporting solution that helps public agencies track, measure, and share information about federal stimulus programs through easy-to-use graphical dashboards and maps. The solution offers an intranet portal with dashboards and key performance indicators, detailed project tracking and reporting, and a citizen-facing website. The programs that make up Stimulus360 include Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services), and the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system.
“Most Arizona state agencies were already familiar with Microsoft programs such as SQL Server and Microsoft Office, and this familiarity was a big plus,” Chinnagangannagari says. “It would minimize training and empower users to do their own reporting, which would help us hit our deadline. We also liked the fact that we could use Stimulus360 for the long haul, beyond ARRA requirements, and the fact that the Microsoft solution was less expensive than some of the others. Stimulus360 was also easy for us to customize ourselves without relying on outside vendors.”
Three-Month Project
Microsoft introduced the Arizona Governor’s Office of Economic Recovery to InfoStrat, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that was helping Microsoft develop Stimulus360 and was engaged with a number of other state and local government entities. Three dedicated people from the Office of Economic Recovery worked with InfoStrat to complete the ARRA reporting solution in just three months, in time to meet the October 2009 deadline. “The federal government made a twelfth-hour data-model change in August, but we were able to accommodate it and still meet the October deadline, which is pretty remarkable,” Hanson says.
InfoStrat held weekly conference calls with Arizona and two other states that it was helping implement Stimulus360 so that all the states were learning from one another at the same time and sharing insights. “Every state has its own unique security standards and reporting requirements, and Stimulus360 is flexible enough to accommodate them,” says Chris Wilson, Managing Partner at InfoStrat. “We didn’t have to sacrifice any state’s IT architecture or security requirements to implement the solution.”
Automated Reporting Process
The Office of Economic Recovery provides the 24 state agencies and universities receiving stimulus funds with Microsoft Office Excel 2007 templates, which they use to submit their stimulus expenditures. Each quarter, the Office of Economic Recovery then imports these Excel worksheets into Stimulus360—this takes a few hours as the organizations cumulatively submit around 450 individual reports each quarter—and spends additional time reviewing the data for quality assurance.
The state then submits its ARRA reports to the federal government by the tenth of the month. After a federal review period, the state responds to questions and makes any changes required by federal officials. Once the data is final, usually by the thirtiethof the reporting month, the Office of Economic Recovery extracts appropriate subsets of data from Stimulus360 to create reports that are posted on its public stimulus-spending website.
“Gathering the data and confirming its accuracy takes some time, but producing reports in Stimulus360 is push-button easy and takes minutes,” says Ryan Sommers, Manager of IT Projects and Services in the Arizona Office of Economic Recovery. “With the rich graphical user interface and colorful charts and dashboards, it’s very easy for state officials, recipient organizations, and the public to explore stimulus funding across the state.”
On the public website, citizens can view ARRA expenditures by recipient, location, time period, and other variables. They can see, for example, how much stimulus money the State Department of Education spent in Flagstaff. Or, they can see that the Arizona Game and Fish Department received ARRA funding for two projects, and then click each project to view the award amount, project description, project status, number of jobs created, and other information.
Benefits
The State of Arizona met its ARRA reporting requirements on time with a flexible solution that can be used for other reporting needs. With a centralized view of statewide data, government officials and members of the public have full visibility into easy, graphical tracking of stimulus spending in the state.
Fast, Cost-Effective ARRA Solution
By using Microsoft Stimulus360, the State of Arizona was able to create its ARRA reporting solution in just three months, while other states averaged six to nine months. “If we had missed the deadline, there could have been serious repercussions such as being noncompliant with federal award stipulations, which could prohibit future grant opportunities,” Chinnagangannagari says. “We were able to configure and customize Stimulus360 to meet our needs in a very short time.”
Plus, the solution was flexible enough to accommodate the many data-model changes that the federal government issued while states were still developing their reporting solutions. “Meeting the constantly changing federal requirements resulted in many changes to our solution during development,” says Aaron Sandeen, Deputy Director of IT for the Arizona Governor’s Office of Economic Recovery. “We were able to make these changes once, in Stimulus360, and have them automatically propagated in hundreds of Office Excel data-gathering templates. This represented a dramatic time savings. If we didn’t have Stimulus360, we would have had to spend weeks doing what this program does in minutes.”
At the core of the Stimulus360 platform are Microsoft SQL Server, Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which are serving as a catalyst for new developments inside Arizona state government. “Stimulus360 brought Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Office SharePoint Server 2007 into the state, which we can use for other projects,” Sandeen says. “This amortizes our ARRA solution cost across many more projects, which makes our return on investment even greater. Also, because we already had staff members with experience in Microsoft technologies, we did not have to hire new staff, which we would have had to do with solutions from other vendors.”
Easy Tracking of Stimulus Funds
With the graphical charting and dashboard capabilities built into Stimulus360, the State of Arizona can clearly and simply present complex financial data to a broad audience, including the citizens of Arizona. “The U.S. Freedom of Information Act has long made this kind of data legally available to the public, but the problem was, you had to go to individual agencies, solicit the data, and then try to make sense of it,” Sandeen says. “With Stimulus360, we’re able to bring it all together in one place. This is a huge benefit to state officials, too. We have a centralized view of statewide data that we never had before. This gives us the ability to standardize the ARRA reporting process across the state, ensure quality consistency, and use a single, central team to manage it.”
Flexible Reporting Foundation
The state not only has a full-featured ARRA reporting solution, but also one that is flexible enough to accommodate future ARRA changes and other financial reporting needs. “Government agencies are only coming up with more compliance requirements,” Hanson says. “With Stimulus360, we can respond to changes to current reporting requirements and to future needs. We’d simply need to add a couple of tabs to the application to include new grants or programs. Even significant customizations would not be difficult, considering our staff’s familiarity with the underlying Microsoft programs.”
Additionally, for the first time, the state has a common data platform that enables multiple grant-management groups across the state to collaborate. “We’re able to discuss the same data, using the same tools,” Sandeen says. “Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars for each agency to purchase and maintain separate ARRA reporting solutions, we made one investment.”
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