Government Agency: U.S. Census Bureau

Solution or Platform Selected: Salesforce.com CRM and Cloud Computing

1. The Government agency's challenge that led to the Cloud or SaaS adoption.
   The US Census Bureau was in need of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to coordinate and track partnership activities between the Census Bureau and outside organizations. These partner organizations run the gamut from state and local governments, community-based organizations, to businesses and non-profits. The goal of this CRM system was to provide the ability to record, track, and manage partner contacts and activities between various geographically distributed Census staff.



2. The solution that was chosen and why that particular solution was selected.
   To meet this need, the US Census Bureau selected a solution provided by Salesforce.com and Acumen Solutions. The Census Bureau recognized the need for a rapidly deployable SaaS solution because of an aggressive deployment schedule. In addition, the Census planned to assemble a geographically dispersed temporary workforce in the thousands to enter and manage contacts. The Census Bureau appreciated that Salesforce.com required no installation or plug-ins be downloaded to these staff PCs. This meant that the Census Bureau was able to avoid coordination of a complex and costly software rollout to remote staff. The partnership activities within Census are at their peak during a two-year timeframe leading up to the 2010 decennial census. Following that timeframe, partnership efforts decrease drastically. By using a SaaS application, the Census Bureau was able to only purchase and deploy a solution for a limited period of time, due to the subscription based model. This means that they did not have to invest a far greater amount of funding on a client-server based solution that they would only be using in mass quantities for 24-48 months.



3. Results of the implementation. How did the vendor meet the agency's needs?
   The Integrated Partner Contact Database (IPCD) project (Salesforce/Acumen/CRM) was rapidly implemented by Acumen Solutions in time to meet the aggressive timeframe set forth by the Census Bureau. Census had a hard go-live date that required a 12 week implementation for the first phase of users, in order to be functional for operation on the decennial census. This deadline was met, and Acumen Solutions had implemented the first phase of Salesforce users (over 100) in under 12 weeks. The Census Bureau will deploy up to 2,200 users on the Salesforce CRM application at the projects' peak, and these users will be using Salesforce to directly manage the partnership activities for the 2010 decennial census. US Census Contact: David "JR" Wycinsky; Salesforce.com Contact: John Pellet, jpellet@salesforce.com