OpenGov Enables Better Budgeting for the City of Grand Island Using AWS

The City of Grand Island, Nebraska, saved 1,000 hours of yearly team time using AWS Partner OpenGov’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions on AWS. The city government migrated away from financial software and spreadsheets to OpenGov’s SaaS suites, which enabled it to increase efficiency, collaboration, and agility across departments and better serve its residents. OpenGov’s enterprise cloud-software suites power the financial, administrative, and business processes of governments across the United States. Using AWS services like Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2), OpenGov enables rapid security maturation for customers like Grand Island and scales up while meeting service-level agreements for availability and reliability.

With an estimated population of 50,000, Grand Island employs more than 500 government employees across 10 departments. The city has a direct network, but four of its departments—the law enforcement center, the 911 dispatch center, the libraries, and the utility plant—operate on their own networks. Previously, the city government relied on the financial software Munis and spreadsheets to track and manage its budget across disparate departments. However, that system consumed staff time and led to errors. “Data could be compromised from failed formulas or human error because we had to manually key in information to multiple spots on different networks,” says Brian Schultz, Assistant Finance Director of Grand Island.

The city needed a cloud-based solution that it could use to build its budget more efficiently and more transparently across departments. In 2017, it began to use OpenGov’s Budgeting and Planning solution; the multiyear planning capability enables the city to stay on track with its 20-year strategic plan. In 2019, the city became an early adopter of OpenGov’s Workforce Planning, and in 2021, it implemented the permitting module of Citizen Services. “Our departments are not housed under one umbrella, but they need access to the same budget software,” says Schultz. “It made sense to use a cloud-based solution because as long as staff have internet access and the authority to access the solution, they can access it from anywhere.”

OpenGov’s full ERP solution on AWS, called the OpenGov ERP Cloud, comprises of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for budgeting and planning, financial management, citizen services, and reporting and transparency. The company is a member of the AWS Public Sector Partner Program, which recognizes AWS Partners that have cloud-based solutions and experience across government, space, education, and nonprofits. OpenGov is also an AWS Government Competency Partner, having demonstrated its experience in delivering quality solutions to help government agencies meet mandates, reduce costs, drive efficiencies, and increase innovation.

OpenGov has seen many governments migrate to the cloud to become more efficient and agile, even during disasters. An OpenGov survey of over 500 local US governments showed that the COVID-19 pandemic spurred over half of governments of all sizes (or 76 percent of cities with populations over 50,000) to adopt hardware and cloud-based software to support remote work. On AWS, OpenGov maintained the high performance of its SaaS solutions despite a surge in usage during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company avoided overloading its solutions by taking advantage of the automatic scaling capabilities of Amazon EC2, a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Automatic scaling enabled OpenGov to meet customers’ service-level agreements around availability and reliability and maintain cost.

OpenGov uses AWS to manage its infrastructure and has designed its security infrastructure and configuration using AWS-recommended security best practices. The company has redundancy and disaster-recovery plans in place. “Nothing’s better than sharing security responsibility between OpenGov and AWS,” says Danny Graves, Director of Security and Compliance at OpenGov. “The wide range of security services from AWS eases the burden of framework implementation and enables teams to quickly realize security maturation.” In OpenGov’s two AWS databases, data stored at rest is encrypted, as are its automated backups, read replicas, and snapshots. In most backend services, OpenGov uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL, which makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale deployments for the open-source relational database PostgreSQL in the cloud. It also relies on Amazon Aurora for MySQL, a MySQL-compatible relational database service that delivers up to five times the throughput of standard MySQL running on the same hardware, and enables existing MySQL applications and tools to run without requiring modification.

Being on AWS spurs innovation and results in significant cost savings, which OpenGov passes to its customers. Further, the OpenGov ERP Cloud enables government teams to have a shared view of the data. That democratization and greater visibility of data have helped governments optimize their budgets, often enabling them to save 1 percent of their budgets through process improvements.

“For customers, the most valuable way that AWS manifests in our products is the ease of use,” says Steph Beer, Director of Communications at OpenGov. “We can build and iterate on cloud software in a way we can’t with locally hosted software to deliver well-designed products for mission-critical government functions.”

Grand Island’s finance department saved 1,000 hours of manual labor—equating to half the time of a full-time staffer—by adopting OpenGov’s Budgeting and Planning solution, which enabled the team to allocate a budget analyst’s time to more strategic projects. “Rather than have one person manually enter the same change six times and hope they don’t key it in wrong, I can print an update within minutes,” says Schultz. The city saw even more cost savings by relying on the user-friendly interface. “We stopped producing paper budget reports,” says Schultz. “A lot of time and cost had gone into printing a physical book that was basically outdated by the time we delivered it. Using OpenGov made doing interim budget books and informational reports so much simpler.”

On AWS, OpenGov can update features and accessibility according to Grand Island’s needs. “Using AWS helps us innovate and close gaps quickly,” says Beer. Now the city is better prepared for unpredictable events. “The OpenGov SaaS solutions give us flexibility and the ease of knowing that if something were to happen, we have a product that would help,” says Schultz.

As an AWS Partner using an AWS infrastructure, OpenGov helps governments such as that of Grand Island optimize costs and workloads to better serve residents. “OpenGov is always meeting niche government-based software needs,” says Schultz. “AWS provides a diverse set of highly reliable, secure, and scalable cloud services for SaaS providers like OpenGov,” says Ashwani Wason, Vice President of Engineering and Operations at OpenGov. “Its services enable the success not only of OpenGov but also of our customers—governments across the United States.”