InfoStrat Teaming with Infinite Group, Inc.

InfoStrat is proud to announce its partnership with Infinite Group, Inc., delivering Microsoft Stimulus360 to state and local governments.

"Stimulus360 is all about making sure that public sector agencies are in line with the most current reporting requirements for ARRA dollars," said Michael S. Smith, President and CEO of Infinite Group, Inc. "Our partnership with InfoStrat means that we can deliver Stimulus360 solutions with more accurate and highly compliant reporting, thereby eliminating red tape and helping the country put the Stimulus into action. Our team is curently implementing STimulus360 for the state of Mississippi."

For the full press release, click here.

Lessons from Stimulus Reporting First Round

Now that October has passed, recipients of ARRA Stimulus funding can put their first reporting period behind them. The data is now in the hands of OMB and other federal agencies, and will soon be displayed in all its glory on www.recovery.gov. So, how did it go?

Overall, Stimulus360 proved to be a flexible and responsive platform for tracking and reporting ARRA funding. The flexibility was tested by changes in reporting requirements that continued nearly until the day that reporting was enabled. The schema was changed several times, but all our clients using the system were able to submit on time. One of our clients said that with Stimulus360 she was able to "do in 20 minutes what would have taken her two days."

What will happen next? We anticipate that OMB will refine the process a bit and make it simpler to report in January, especially for recipients of large numbers of grants. No doubt there will be many lessons from the first round of reporting and the website will be improved both in terms of user interface and performance.

The number of grants will grow significantly between now and January, as grants flow through the approval process. One of our clients estimated that they will need to report on four times as many grants in January than they did in May.

On the transparency front, states, counties and cities will find out which presentations of data are most effective for their constituents. New visualizations and analysis tools will be applied to the data to make it easier to understand.

Only time will tell how long the stimulus efforts will continue, but it is safe to say that this effort will change how government works for a long time to come.

New OMB Stimulus Guidance Has No Showstoppers

Last week, the Office of Management and Budget released new guidance for recipients of ARRA (Stimulus) funding. This guidance, called M-09-21, elaborates on the reporting requirements for state and local government.

The good news for government is that there are no big surprises here. The weekly report previously mentioned has disappeared from the latest guidance.

Reporting will be on a quarterly basis, and will track prime recipients, sub-recipients, and vendors who receive payments from prime or sub-recipients. The reports will be submitted to a new website called www.data.gov which is under construction. Governments may submit the reports by filling out a web form, uploading an Excel spreadsheet, or uploading an XML data file.

Each reporting period allows for validation of the data, review by the submitter and then review by federal agencies. After reviews are completed the information is transferred to www.recovery.gov where the public can access the data.

Microsoft Stimulus360 is designed to fulfill all these reporting requirements and provide additional ways to track information, aggregate and analyze, and publish information to citizens. Watch for announcements of new reports as they are released.

Elements of Microsoft Stimulus360

Microsoft Stimulus360 offers a rich set of content, features and tools for state and local government to track funding, proposals and projects relating to the economic stimulus program.

Many customers have asked me for a brief summary of what Stimulus360 contains, so here is the shortest version ever. I think Stimulus360 boils down to these fundamental elements:

1. Collaborative tools. Users need a place to share information, collaborate on documents such as proposals and status reports, and view dashboards and other reports. Stimulus360 provides a portal for these purposes.
2. Data analysis. Managers want to see information in many ways. Stimulus360 provides sophisticated tools to aggregate data, showing totals in multiple dimensions such as geographically, by program type, by agency, and more.
3. Detailed project tracking. In order to general reports to federal agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget as well as state agencies, Stimulus360 provides a detailed data model and data entry forms to capture the key data elements. It contains reports to help with compliance as well as dashboards and maps.
4. Transparency. Stimulus360 includes a website template to publish reports to the public and to gather information from constituents and contractors.

I will be exploring these elements in depth with blog entries, articles and videos in the coming weeks. Here is the first video, focused on business intelligence.

New InfoStrat Video on Channel 9

Channel 9 just posted the latest InfoStrat video featuring Josh Wall and Josh Blake showing a Microsoft Surface control to interact with Virtual Earth.

This impressive video was filmed at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reston, VA. The original proof of concept was developed for a Department of Defense customer.

InfoStrat is one of Microsoft's pioneers in Surface development, and has integrated the device into multiple solutions for public sector and commercial uses.

The control is available on CodePlex.

Blogs and Bloggers

This is my most meta posting ever. I'm blogging about my blogging today.

I have been invited as a guest blogger by Microsoft.

Check it out here.

The blog is about Gov 2.0 and Stimulus360, two of my favorite subjects.

Perhaps next I will tweet about this blog that points to the other blog.

National Dialogue on U.S. Stimulus

This week you can witness a bold experiment in Gov 2.0. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the Office of Management and Budget in partnership with the National Academy of Public Administration, is currently hosting a week-long national online dialogue to engage leading information technology (IT) vendors, thinkers, and consumers to provide ideas on how best to use Recovery.gov as a place to monitor the expenditure and use of recovery funds.

The format of the site is for a user to suggest an idea, and then other users submit comments on that idea. Most of the ideas I read were vendors touting software products, although some were more general. Ideas are rated by visitors on a scale of 1 to five stars. As of today, near the end of the discussion period, fewer than 300 ideas had been posted. The highest rated idea was four stars. The highest number of comments for an idea was 31 comments. Most of the ideas have no rating and no comments.

The site is interesting and raises many questions about governing in the current era. What is the role of sites like this for policy debates in the future? How much weight will be put on these "ideas" in decisions? Does the site itself allow enough transparency? Does the use of aliases for contributors and the ability to create multiple accounts to vote for your own ideas make the approach too vulnerable to gaming? How do we know that people contributing are U.S. citizens? Does this matter? What about the digital divide and those who do not have access to this site?