[Written when I worked for the Alliance for Innovation.]
“Dear Local Government Employee – We need a way to track our grant applications and requests for stimulus dollars in a collaborative environment that will allow easy reporting and documentation. It needs to be easy to use, instant, and error-proof. If you could find the technology, implement it, and train all relevant employees by the end of next week, that would be excellent. Thank you, Your City Manager.”
If you received an analogous email in the past few weeks, you’re not alone. Deborah Dillon, Director of Youth and Education Programs at the City of Phoenix, was asked to do just that, in not so many words.
Local governments across the country are looking now at the recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and attempting to match the right projects with the right dollars. But matching local opportunities to national grants is not the only step in the process. Even for small local governments, but especially for medium and large organizations, the true challenge is creating unified proposals that match the best opportunities to the best funding sources.
The City of Phoenix had just this challenge. With over 12,000 employees, more than 40 departments and offices, and a variety of interdepartmental projects, there was an even greater opportunity for mistakes and missed opportunities. Without collaboration, work might be duplicated, grant deadlines might be missed, and individual department applications might not be as strong as possible.
So it was on a Friday afternoon in March that Ms. Dillon was asked to find a product to centralize the citywide efforts to identify federal opportunities, and then create a unified database that anyone could easily use. Ms. Dillon is known for being an early adopter of technology, and with her 20 years of experience at the City of Phoenix, she also has a now-intuitive sense of the needs and desires of her colleagues and coworkers.
When she turned to the Information Technology Department, their joint answer was clear: Microsoft SharePoint, a technology already licensed to and implemented by the City of Phoenix.
(SharePoint is a collection of server-side software products that allow for a variety of Intranet and Internet tools. There is a wealth of resources on Microsoft’s website (www.microsoft.com/sharepoint) about compatibility and usability. For more information on the technical specifications, please visit their website).
The City of Phoenix uses the software to update and manage two linked databases: one for the ARRA sources of funding, and another for the potential projects the City of Phoenix has identified for stimulus funding. The ARRA side of the database contains information about each grant program, the federal department it belongs to, relevant deadlines, and further information. The ARRA collection of information is updated infrequently, and only when new information is released at the federal level about specific grants and programs.
In the database of city projects, each project is assigned a primary department, and the specific source of funding that the project would utilize. From that function alone, the city was able to identify overlapping projects for the same source of funding, and either combine the projects or decide which project would be best.
Ms. Dillon and the IT department created the form and function of the city’s ARRA database, and they did it all in less than just a few hours on a Friday afternoon. By Tuesday morning of the next week, the system was ready to be launched, and training occurred throughout the week. In one week’s time, an entirely new system was created, all of the potential ARRA funding sources were entered, and nearly all of the department contacts were trained.
The availability of information has created a system for internal transparency that has connected all of the department contacts for stimulus funding. Because of this transparency, Ms. Dillon says there is a certain esprit de corps among the employees working on these projects because they no longer feel isolated by location, department, or task.
The City of Phoenix successfully reached a goal: connect people while creating a process to easily enter, share, track, and report information. This technology, for the City of Phoenix, may be just the additional leverage they need to obtain additional stimulus dollars, funding more community and economic development projects, all of which create additional community benefit. In difficult economic times, there may be no greater outcome that a technology can offer.
Samuel Feldman is a Research Assistant for the Alliance for Innovation, and a Marvin Andrews Fellow in the Master’s of Public Administration Program at Arizona State University.