New Jersey expands push for friendlier digital services

Are you ready, willing and able to work?

That may sound like a simple question, but New Jersey Chief Innovation Officer Dave Cole said many unemployment insurance claimants get it wrong when they’re applying for benefits. Cole told StateScoop in a recent interview that rewriting such questions to capture the spirit rather than letter of the laws they reflect has been a key part of his office’s work as it makes government services easier and more accessible to use.

Cole said the “ready, willing and able” question was rephrased along the lines of: “If you were offered a job, would you be able to start it immediately,” a phrasing relatively few applicants struggle parse. 

From making changes like these, Cole said, his Office of Innovation has managed to cut the average time each claimant spends filling out an unemployment insurance application from nearly four hours to 24 minutes.

“We think [that] speaks to people getting access to benefits hopefully faster, with fewer errors, certainly less frustration going through that process,” Cole said. “And we’re able to do that through really going step-by-step through the applications, looking at the questions that were confusing, testing and designing with users, rewriting those questions, simplifying them.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy in January named Cole, a White House adviser during Barack Obama’s first term, as the state’s latest innovation chief. Now more than six months into the new role and six years after the innovation office’s creation, Cole said his office is finding success helping other state agencies streamline their processes in a similar fashion.

Cole said technology has been a useful tool as his office strives to save time and cut inefficiency, but that it’s rarely the centerpiece of its work. While researching the state’s unemployment insurance processes, his office’s staff listened in to live and prerecorded calls to the state’s call center. Cole said one low-tech outcome was replacing a long and confusing URL for identity verification with a shortened URL that took about 60 seconds less time for call takers to relay to applicants over the phone.

Cole estimated that such tweaks add up to big time saved in the aggregate, allowing the call center to get to more applicants each day.

New Jersey, like most state governments, is saddled with decades of old technologies and processes. When asked how he prioritizes work, Cole said he looks for projects that can “deliver some sort of measurable improvement in pretty short order.”

He pointed to an early project the innovation office undertook in conjunction with the U.S. Digital Service, the federal equivalent of Cole’s office, in which it improved the responsiveness of state websites on mobile devices. He said that that “quick win” demonstrated the value of his office’s “human-centered, iterative approach,” opening the way for heftier projects, like rebuilding the IT systems undergirding resident touchpoints like websites and apps.

Cole said he also looks closely at which agencies want to be helped.

“We need those partners within those agencies to work with us to help us understand what they’ve tried, what worked and didn’t work, what they would love to do if they had just a little bit of extra time, extra talent, extra funding that we can bring to bear through our team,” he said.

Riding the success of projects like streamlining the unemployment insurance application, and with so many old IT systems about, Cole’s office is growing. He said the office plans to hire another 20 staff members, for a total of 70, over the next two months.

New Jersey was among the states to benefit from federal grant funding provided in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the frailty of unemployment, health care and other IT systems was laid bare by droves of unexpected applicants. Cole said such funding is welcome, but that his office wants to spend it before its deadline at the end of 2026.

“It’s a real opportunity, but it’s also a moment for us to hit a real sprint to try to make the most of that,” he said.