New Jersey

The New Jersey Office of Innovation launched the Innovation Skills Accelerator, a free, online program to train state staff to use innovative methods – including design thinking, evidence-based decision-making, and collective intelligence – to solve public problems. The state regularly relies on data for messaging and performance management. One example is the annual report on the state’s response to the opioid overdose epidemic and the NJ Transit Performance Site created by an executive order.

The Governor’s COVID-19 briefings constantly referenced the use of data to drive decision-making throughout the pandemic. Although the briefings ended in February 2022, these approaches were shared with the public in real time through the state’s COVID-19 Information Hub and a new statewide email program that reaches more than 1.5 million people each week.

Following the appointment of a Chief Innovation Officer as a cabinet-level official in 2018, the state has continued to invest in the expansion of the Office of Innovation. The New Jersey Office of Innovation’s Innovation Skills Accelerator has expanded asynchronous video-based introductions to strategic uses of evidences (including data, resident engagement and fast field scanning) to include live “bootcamp” trainings to help State employees apply the skills from the online training to their own projects. Over the course of the last year, public servants in New Jersey have been able to participate in over 40 programs. The NJ Office of Innovation has also developed new agency-wide course offerings, including a first-of-its kind program on uses of data and evidence for employees of the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General.

Related to workforce issues, in May 2021, the Office of Innovation, the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), and The Workers Lab kicked off the Future of Work Accelerator, an open innovation challenge to recruit innovators whose work advances worker health and safety by improving access to benefits, strengthens training opportunities, and bolsters workers’ voices. The Office of Innovation is also spearheading the Business First Stop initiative – an interagency initiative that improves and simplifies businesses’ interactions with state government by combining new technology, data-sharing, modern policy approaches, and improved customer service to deliver the centralized digital one-stop experience for residents’  businesses and entrepreneurs.

New Jersey’s Chief Data Officer leads statewide data transparency initiatives and open data projects, such as the Open Data Center, Governor’s Transparency, Superstorm Sandy Transparency, and Governor’s Disaster Recovery Office Transparency Site for COVID spending  websites. The CDO serves as the coordinator, architect, and content manager for New Jersey’s Open Data Portal. This role also establishes best practices, administrative rules, policies, standards, procedures, and bulletins as they relate to open data, enterprise information, and data management.

To combat incomplete or inconsistent data, New Jersey has set up asset level and column metadata standards for the datasets available on Data.NJ.Gov, the state’s open data portal.

New Jersey partners with Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, to operate the New Jersey Education to Earnings Data System (NJEEDS), a statewide longitudinal data system designed to improve the performance of state education and workforce initiatives. NJEEDS is overseen by an executive leadership council and convenes a data stewards work group from relevant state agencies. Four state agencies also partner with Rutgers to operate the Integrated Population Health Data project to promote population health research.

New Jersey has technology infrastructure to support data sharing and usage, across agencies, with external partners, and with the public. For cross-agency data sharing and use, the New Jersey Office of Information Technology (NJOIT) maintains an enterprise data warehouse, consisting of the New Jersey Administrative Warehouse System and agency-specific data marts. In addition, NJOIT maintains a business intelligence reporting service that allows the State’s executive branch agencies to analyze and report on data from both data warehouse and data mart infrastructures.

The New Jersey Open Data Portal harnesses the power of reusability and modularity to create a centralized layer of application programming interfaces (APIs) that connect data and libraries of software components to enable rapid development of AI applications across the enterprise. In this model, application development becomes less about building new functionality from scratch, and more about orchestrating existing, complementary functionality to drive scale and scope.

New Jersey’s Prescription Monitoring Program integrates data from multiple state agencies, including the Department of Health, the Division of Consumer Affairs, the Office of the Attorney General, and other law enforcement bodies, to power the Overdose Data Dashboard. The Department of Health uses the dashboard to make decisions about access to medications, such as naloxone, designed to rapidly reverse opioid overdose and harm reduction services.

The previous three budgets each appropriated $1 million in funding for the New Jersey Policy Lab, led by Rutgers University, that will contribute high-quality, nonpartisan research and analysis of policy-based solutions facing New Jersey. The initiative, granted by the New Jersey Office of the Secretary of Higher Education, will also build coalitions across governments and community organizations to support evidence-based policy initiatives, assist stakeholders in troubleshooting implementation issues, provide data modeling for policy recommendations, and evaluate the impacts of proposed statewide public policy measures.

In 2022, the New Jersey Department of State used a tiered evidence framework from the AmeriCorps Evidence Exchange to both define and prioritize evidence, as well as allocate funds through its AmeriCorps New Jersey State Grant Program. Criteria from the Evidence Exchange assigned preference to evidence-based interventions assessed as ‘Moderate’ or ‘Strong’. To do this, the grant attributed points within Program Design (worth 50% of total points) towards evidence-based criteria, including Evidence Tier (worth 4%) and Evidence Quality (worth 8%). Evidence Base was subsequently awarded up to 12 points. The RFP asserted that “many of these interventions have demonstrated effectiveness in improving outcomes for individuals living in underserved communities and that the agency has committed resources to supporting grantees seeking to replicate and evaluate these interventions in similar communities”; thus, evidence was prioritized by stating that “all applicants must propose program designs that are either evidence-based or evidence-informed. Applicants assessed as lower than the Preliminary evidence tier (i.e., Pre-Preliminary) must provide adequate responses to the Evidence Quality review criteria in order to be considered for funding.” Applicants were encouraged to consider interventions through the AmeriCorps Mandatory Supplemental Guidance that further defined evidence tiers.