USBE IT and grants teams report tight staffing on UCIMS build; Utah Grama vendor issues largely resolved

Utah State Board of Education IT leadership briefed the finance committee on the multi‑year UCIMS (USIMS/UCIMS) modernization and progress on the Utah Grama grants system.

Jared Phelps, USBE IT director, said the UCIMS program was scoped to replace roughly 28 legacy systems and that the program faces two main constraints: available funding and staff capacity. Phelps said the team must continue supporting legacy systems while building the new platform, noting the current in‑house software developer pool is small (he cited roughly seven developers responsible for legacy maintenance as well as migration work), and that contractors support much of the UCIMS build. Product owners for the educator, student and finance domains reported incremental adoption metrics: the educator domain reported background checks, licensing renewals and 104 pilot users from 41 LEAs for assignment and employment tools; the student backpack was live in 101 districts for assessment data; the finance product team is coordinating with seven vendors used by LEAs to automate budget and actual submissions to UCIMS.

Rebecca Nelson, director of grants administration, told the committee the Utah Grama system’s recent production issues have been resolved: development work (2.1c) was deployed to production and outstanding vendor tickets were reduced to nine. Nelson said her three‑person team (herself, Sarah and Louie) resolves the majority of user tickets internally and escalates harder issues to the vendor; the office plans expanded training and outreach to reduce LEA burden.

Committee members asked for follow‑up on licensing costs for embedded analytics (Power BI) and whether licensing would be cost‑prohibitive for external LEA users. Finance product staff explained they are building a wrapper to surface Power BI reports inside UCIMS to avoid assigning individual Power BI licenses to hundreds of external users.