Modern Grants Management Requires Agility, Simplicity

At first glance, grants management may not seem like the most compelling or essential focus for digital transformation in government. But consider the consequences when grant management happens in an uncoordinated or inefficient manner. Whether a citywide inconvenience of a stalled highway project or the potentially life-or-death consequences of a delayed homeowners’ assistance program in a natural disaster or other emergency—the impacts from problems in the grant management process can be significant and widespread.

Unfortunately, the status quo is inadequate when it comes to most grant management platforms and solutions today. Databases can be overly complex and siloed, multiple data standards across inputs and outputs complicates effective communication and a general lack of transparency makes it difficult to ensure compliance and track possible waste, fraud or mismanagement of funds. Fortunately, next-generation approaches solve these challenges and give teams more power and control across the entire grant management lifecycle—from procurement and rollout, to reporting and close-out.

Complexity Poses Challenges for Grants Management Platforms

State and local agencies face numerous hurdles in developing and implementing effective systems to manage grant programs. Major pain points include dealing with multiple and disparate systems, lack of visibility in monitoring performance and excessively manual processes that bog down the daily work of grant administrators.

When combined with increasingly complex datasets and a lack of user accessibility, these pain points become exponentially more challenging and make accurate reporting exceedingly difficult. As just one indicator of the scope of the problem, a recent survey done in conjunction with the National Grants Management Association and George Washington University showed over 20% of grantees still relied entirely on email reporting, and nearly half struggled through a combination of both email reporting and direct data entry.

Grant management teams clearly need a better way, especially as the size and complexity of the modern grantmaking ecosystem continues to increase. Automation is urgently needed to bring more agility and scalability across systems, free grant managers of tedious and time-consuming work, and improve an agency's ability to easily track and report performance and outcomes.

Laying the Foundation for Agility

Fortunately, there are increasingly powerful options for state and local agencies to automate and simplify the grant management processes, while also taming the sprawl of disparate systems and data. The foundation for much of this solution rests on something known as data fabric. This is a modern data management technology that creates a unified view of all data—regardless of where the data is physically located—so that silos fall away and information is no longer locked in disparate systems and difficult to access in a usable format.

The reason data fabric is so critical in grant management modernization is that state and local governments have traditionally needed to physically migrate, reformat and configure data across multiple systems in order to connect and access the many different applications and platforms required to administer a grant across what may be dozens of agencies and departments. Data fabric allows these connections to happen without the migration hassles and the extra time and money they cost.

Furthermore, by creating a connected, frictionless and low-latency data foundation, data fabric can set the stage for significant innovation and a much more agile ecosystem across the entire grants management lifecycle—including the grant proposal and administration process, proposal preparation and pre-award administration, accounting processes and post-award reporting.

More Capabilities, More Automation

With a data fabric foundation in place, a modernized grant management platform can deliver comprehensive automation and monitoring tools to ensure streamlined workflows and a standardized approach compliant with federal regulations. Streamlined processes, rules and interfaces ensure end-to-end management functionality, and mobile capabilities allow grants managers to work effortlessly in the field. A data fabric also makes it much easier to stand up contact center applications that accelerate customer experience, increase agent efficiency and deliver business impact.

The best solutions leverage plenty of automation to scale and accelerate an array of functions while reducing or eliminating manual steps. Automated document workflows for budgeting, audit, compliance and more can quickly and accurately extract data from different document types and allow grant managers to easily manipulate dashboards and produce reports in real time using data from multiple systems. This includes seamless integration with Grants.gov, SAM.gov and other essential databases to automatically log new transactions, allocate budgets and reconcile spending.

Low-code interfaces are the key to putting this enhanced functionality within reach of more government stakeholders. Using low-code programs, grant management professionals can make many platform modifications on their own and choose which metrics to collect or analyze around performance and outcomes. Top-level administrators and front-line professionals alike can effortlessly collaborate and drill down into grants management processes to elicit new insights and drive better decisions.

Finally, employing these new technologies must also include workforce training and related measures to speed adoption. This may actually be one of the easiest steps in the transformation. The key is to move the users’ expectations away from the dread of having to learn new rules for yet another off-the-shelf commercial software product—and toward a world of connected data and low-code simplicity that will bring their own processes to life, with more control and fewer headaches.

Conclusion

Grants management systems, particularly for state and local governments, are in desperate need of modernization. The good news is that next-generation grants management platforms are increasingly available. They can transform grant management with a data fabric foundation for data agility, together with low-code usability that saves money and time while expanding more functionality and control to stakeholders across the entire grants management lifecycle.