New Jersey

The New Jersey Office of Information Technology (OIT) is responsible for the policies and standards governing State agencies’ use of technology, including data governance, which policies can be found online at its policy library. New Jersey’s Chief Data Officer, a position established within OIT in 2015 and codified into law in 2017, 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. The CDO follows the Strategic IT Governance 2.0 Model for Transparency websites.

The Department of Law and Public Safety set aside $200,000 of the $2 million operating budget for an evaluation of the Alternative Responses to Reduce Instances of Violence & Escalation (ARRIVE Together) program in FY 2023. The Department instead secured funding from a foundation to pay for the evaluation.

In New Jersey, every state, county, and local law enforcement agency is required to establish a process for disciplining officers who commit misconduct or otherwise violate the agency’s rules, consistent with statewide standards. In September 2022, the Department of Law and Public Safety launched a data dashboard about police agencies’ internal affairs investigations. The dashboard provides information in a searchable format capable of filtering data by law enforcement agency, the types of allegations involved, and what, if any, disciplinary action was taken. It is believed to be the most comprehensive compilation of statewide internal affairs information to be made accessible to the public by any state in the U.S.

Analysis of internal affairs data has helped to identify areas in which police-public interactions can lead to adverse outcomes and helped to inform initiatives such as the ARRIVE Together, which pairs a law enforcement officer with a certified mental health screener to respond together to 9-1-1 calls for behavioral health crises. In addition to the Department’s partnerships with the foundation funding an evaluation of this program, the Office of Justice Data helps collect and organize the ARRIVE data and has created ARRIVE forms for each participating police department and mental health screener to input data. Internal evaluations of pilot programs in two localities found the program to be effective in reducing use of force, injuries, and arrests, and found no evidence of the racial disparities that often characterize policing outcomes, and a subsequent Brookings evaluation found much the same results. This helped to persuade the Legislature to adopt a Fiscal Year 2024 budget that provides for the statewide expansion of the program. The same foundation has agreed to fund another report to evaluate all of the ARRIVE Together pilots funded under the FY 2024 budget.

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. Through collaborative efforts and the use of compelling data dashboards, the CDO’s office has empowered policymakers to make informed decisions, leading to a more data-driven government. The NJ Economic Insights database is an internal resource that provides weekly information on consumer spending, business revenue, and mobility data on a weekly frequency by census tract. State agencies use this data to continue to monitor and understand the ways in which New Jersey’s recovery from the pandemic progresses.

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 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.

The New Jersey Department of State oversees the AmeriCorps State and National Grants program that funds service-oriented efforts surrounding community health and wellness. In the process of scoring applications for funding, up to 12 points (out of 100) are awarded based on evidence of effectiveness of the proposed services, as defined by the AmeriCorps Evidence Exchange. The State requires applicants who have previously received 3+ years of funding for the same project to submit impact evaluation plans according to the approved AmeriCorps requirements.

New Jersey places a great emphasis on direct community participation in policymaking, which is evident through multiple statewide initiatives.

Wealth Disparity Task Force: Since its creation by Executive Order in 2021, the Wealth Disparity Task Force (WDTF) has focused on reaching out to members of the public for direct feedback in several ways. In the summer of 2022, WDTF members held five virtual listening sessions to gain public feedback for each of the WDTF working groups: Education, Health, Housing, Criminal Justice, and Economy. At the same time, members of the public could also submit written testimony for consideration by the Task Force through a form published on the WDTF website – written testimony is still encouraged and reviewed periodically by members of the WDTF to inform ongoing research and report writing. Based on the recommendations of WDTF, several initiatives that were recently included in the Fiscal Year 2024 Budget, such as a first-generation homeownership down payment assistance program and programs to incentivize employee ownership and supplier diversity.

NJ COVID-19 Task Force on Racial and Health Disparities: Established in 2021, this Task Force was created to study and identify solutions for the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on the State’s minority and marginalized communities. To do so, Task Force members held virtual and in-person public hearings between October and December of 2022 to hear particularly from marginalized communities about the effect of the pandemic on members of the public.