Kori Ann Edwards, managing director of operations in the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, said Go Utah has doled out more than $200 million in financial grants to the state’s businesses since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and used the cloud to help in the distribution of relief funds.
“Leveraging a cloud-based platform that created a single source of truth provided Go Utah with the tools needed to manage the disbursement of relief funds in a step-by-step process,” Edwards said in an interview.
“In addition, dashboards gave us a snapshot of fund deployment for each grant, evaluation tools helped ensure we were providing responsible awards, and funding and contract tools put everything in one place, which has been critical for meeting all the reporting requirements,” she added.
Edwards said there are four best practices agencies should do to help them navigate the challenges and meet their mission and these are recognizing customers as customers; putting data to work by improving services through data-driven insights; embracing a can-do attitude; and planning for a remote work environment.
“A cloud platform enabled us to transition to remote work. We could not have done our jobs from home if our grants management process still ran on a paper-based system,” she noted.
Edwards also mentioned how the adoption of the Salesforce Customer 360 for government platform helped facilitate Go Utah’s fund deployment efforts.
