In a keynote presentation, Stuart McKee, Microsoft's National Technology Officer for State and Local Government, discussed the history of Microsoft Stimulus360 from its beginning one year ago.

Two Stimulus360 customers shared their experience with the solution, the technology, and the federal requirements.

Jamie Etheridge, Deputy Chief Information Officer of the State of Tennessee, shared the experience of the State of Tennessee in Stimulus reporting.  She pointed out that centralized reporting helped the state achieve its goals.   She said that the state was deluged by vendors who wanted to help with Stimulus reporting.  They chose Stimulus360 because it was the most economical, and easiest to implement and modify.

The initial implementation went quickly, and the system was up and running in two weeks.   The state was able to report for Q3 early.  In Q4, the extra edits from OMB were challenging as well as the challenge of verifying and updating zip codes and congressional districts. In addition to the technical hurdles and tight deadline, Tennessee had the added challenge of several key team members contracting H1N1 influenza during the final days of the reporting period.

Aaron Sandeen, Deputy Director of the  State of Arizona Office of Economic Recovery, discussed how the flexible platform allowed state and local government to adapt to changes in the federal data model, including some very close to the reporting deadline. The Governor of Arizona formed the Office of Economic Recovery (OER) to implement a central reporting solution to aggregate data for all state entities.

The biggest challenge for Arizona was the change of the data model by OMB, leading to a new version of Stimulus360.   The reporting deadline compresses the key activity in a ten day period to pull data from multiple systems, load data, clean data and submit all reports.

Stuart McKee concluded with a question and answer period, and discussion of the future of Stimulus360.   This event marks one year since Stimulus360 was conceived.   It was been adopted by over 20 customers nationwide, including six states and many major metropolitan areas accounting for billions of dollars in Stimulus grants.