Government Agency: Utah Division of Arts and Museums (Contact: George Schoemaker, 801-236-7541, gschoemaker@utah.gov)

Solution or Platform Selected: Salesforce CRM

1. The Government agency's challenge that led to the Cloud or SaaS adoption.
   The State of Utah’s Division of Arts and Museums (DAM) is one of six divisions within the Department of Community & Culture. DAM needed a solution to efficiently track outreach efforts and interactions with artists, arts organizations, legislators, media sources, ethnic and tribal groups, municipal and regional officials, and the general public. Division employees used a wide variety of siloed systems to keep track of their respective interactions (e.g., GoldMine, FileMaker Pro, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, even legal pads). This condition naturally created difficulties when division and department management wanted division-wide reports as it would entail multiple individuals reaching into multiple systems to pull out their respective data in a variety of formats that would ultimately have to be brought together into a concise, comprehensive format. In addition, the division dealt with an ongoing issue of duplicate records and processes. At the same time, the department's internal IT staff was spending the majority of its time maintaining the department's existing systems and infrastructure. Any discretionary time they had to deploy new solutions would be allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis to a backlog of an estimated 12-18 months of projects that were already in the pipeline.



2. The solution that was chosen and why that particular solution was selected.
   The State of Utah had always deployed new software solutions in a traditional, on-premises manner (i.e., standing up and maintaining a server, installing the software themselves, etc.). At the urging of internal DAM staff, the division considered several on-premise and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions--knowing the latter approach had the promise of meeting their business needs without having much impact to their internal IT team. The division selected Salesforce CRM for its ease of use, extensibility, and on-demand model. They deployed Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition in two weeks without requiring technical help from their internal IT staff. Monthly DAM staff training sessions helped drive more than 70 percent user adoption during the first year, and the division anticipates 100 percent adoption during the second year. The division also uses RegOnline to register attendees for its annual conference. All information is subsequently updated or added into Salesforce CRM. Last year’s conference generated a 15 percent increase in new leads of people wanting services from the division. Applications downloaded and installed from the Salesforce Force.com AppExchange allow the division to easily extend Salesforce beyond its robust, out-of-the-box, CRM capabilities, such as Vertical Response and AppExtreme's Conga Merge.



3. Results of the implementation. How did the vendor meet the agency's needs?
   With the high user adoption, DAM staff now enter their respective contact and interaction details directly into Salesforce--thus making the above-referenced reports much faster and less labor-intensive to produce. The division has also been able to drop license renewals and upgrade fees on a number of the smaller software applications staff members were using before. Division management is also able to ask questions about its constituents and their services to them that would simply have been too difficult to answer before (e.g., what awards have we issued to citizens living in a given legislative district). At the same time, the department and other agencies are taking notice of DAM's impressive results as they've been able to realize all the business value they had envisioned and hoped for in a very short amount of time with little or no impact to internal IT resources. It is now clear to the State that Salesforce and SaaS solutions, in general, are a powerful way to approach all new desired solutions.