How NASWA’s Open Initiative Is Bringing a Modern Solution to a Legacy Problem

Transcript

This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human.

Show ID [00:00:04]:

The power of data is undeniable. And unharnessed, it's nothing but chaos.

The amount of data was crazy. 

Can I trust it? 

You will waste money. 

Held together with duct tape. 

Doomed to failure.

This season, we're solving problems in real-time to reveal the art of the possible. Making data your ally, using it to lead with confidence and clarity, helping communities and people thrive. This is Data-Driven Leadership, a show by Resultant. 

Jess Carter [00:00:35]:

Hey guys. Welcome back to Data-Driven Leadership. I am really excited about this episode. Sort of selfishly engaged in it.

Jess Carter [00:00:41]:

So I spent four years working on unemployment insurance systems in Indiana and Nevada in the 2010s. That's where I first got my glimpse at public sector work, where policy meets systems meets lived experience in. And I just have a real passion for citizens. I think that, you know, ensuring that our benefits are protected and administered correctly, especially when it's federally funded, I think it's really important. Those are taxpayer dollars and I think it's important to make sure that there is a high level of fidelity in these programs. I've also had loved ones on the unemployment insurance system and I know how stressful that period of time can be for any individual. And it's not partial, like most people will experience some version of being on unemployment in their lifetime or somebody who they know that is. So, today, we're talking to Allison Johnson, who's the Director of Open UI at NASWA and she is leading this new initiative.

Jess Carter [00:01:34]:

Allison is incredible. She's an incredible data-driven leader. And what I like and appreciate about her is how she leverages her knowledge about the history of the program, which does date back to the Great Depression. This is a federal program that we leverage today that our grandparents and great-grandparents leveraged. I mean, it's just, it's incredible. And I am excited for her to walk us through that and walk through her knowledge about policy and then how she's really looking to innovate in the public space. This is not happening everywhere, and it should be. But some of the reasons why it's not happening is because it's really, really hard.

Jess Carter [00:02:09]:

It's hard because it's hard to buy innovation in the public sector. The risks associated to failing at innovation is it looks like you're wasting taxpayer dollars. So it's a high level of risk. Even politically. Most politicians don't want to be leading a state or an entity where we tried innovation, it didn't work. It's very different than the private sector where fail fast is sort of a point of pride. And then I think it just gets really challenging because the vendor community gets limited. Not everyone knows the policies and procedures that are required to build into a system.

Jess Carter [00:02:38]:

And so there's all these custom systems. And again, we're going to talk about that in the episode. So my advice to you is get excited about a podcast that you might not normally be like, wow, unemployment insurance. But what we're really talking about is innovation in the public sector that impacts every single citizen. I think where I got really jazzed when we finished the episode was when our editor said, man, like, I even understand this and it makes sense to me and I'm excited about it and I want to talk about it with my friends. And so I can promise you this, we are on a journey to make the right things really interesting to you in this podcast. And this is my attempt at doing so in unemployment insurance. Enjoy Allison, she is a treasure. 

Jess Carter [00:03:18]:

Welcome back to Data-Driven Leadership. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Today we have Allison Johnson, the Open UI director for the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, also known as NASWA. Let's get into it. Allison, welcome.

Allison Johnson [00:03:34]:

It's great to be here, Jess. Thanks for having me on today.

Jess Carter [00:03:37]:

Yeah, yeah, I'm so glad. So, as somebody who has worked in unemployment for maybe three and a half to four years working on systems, both unemployment and reemployment, I am really excited to talk about this. But we are going to have to convince other people that it's…it's a conversation that they should have. And so before we even get into any of that, can you just start with helping me understand how you got to the position you're in? Like, have you been in unemployment your whole career? I don't think you have, right?

Allison Johnson [00:04:04]:

I haven't. Yeah. I have a bit of an unconventional background, let's say not a linear path. I really found my way into the technology space in about 2013 by education. I'm more of a policy and political science person. But in 2013, I joined the US Office of Personal Management, and they had a program there under the Affordable Care Act. And so we were racing to get everything up and running for healthcare.gov and the state health insurance exchanges. And it was really up close and personal, seeing you can have all the great policy in the world, but how you implement it and the kinds of technology that you use is really where the rubber meets the road.

Allison Johnson [00:04:48]:

And I was really drawn to that intersection. So I was at OPM for about six years. I left civil service and went over to a small civic tech company called Nava. I was there for about four and a half years. And that's where I started working on programs like paid family and medical leave, unemployment insurance, so all of these state-level programs providing benefits to the public through social insurance programs generally. So from Nava I landed at NASWA. And so I'm really excited to take on this initiative and be really ambitious and audacious in what we're trying to achieve here.

Jess Carter [00:05:28]:

That's amazing. So you probably know Randy Gillespie, Scott Sanders. So they were my clients when I was working at Department of Workforce Development in Indiana. I had joined us four months after the unemployment insurance system went live here. So I was drowning in like 11,000 defects. I was trying to affinity diagram and fix and understand how to prioritize. And then I went to the re-employment office and helped with their system. And then Nevada called and said, can we do the same project you just did, but in a third the time? And I was like, probably not.

Allison Johnson [00:06:00]:

No.

Jess Carter [00:06:00]:

So we aimed at that and I think we went live like one month later than that, which to this day drives me crazy. But it was so neat to be able to do. I, I don't know how often in our careers we get to kind of run the same project more or less twice. So using all those lessons learned from the first one was really neat. But I remember Randy and Scott walking into our PMO and helping us prioritize enhancements and things. So it's just crazy to me that they're now kind of with you at NASWA.

Allison Johnson [00:06:26]:

Indeed, yes. Yes.

Jess Carter [00:06:29]:

So now for someone who hasn't spent four years in unemployment, maybe they've had a, a friend or themselves or a family member go through unemployment. But could you like walk through if someone's unfamiliar with it, what is it? And can you provide like a quick overview of how the system works and why states maybe administer their own individual systems?

Allison Johnson [00:06:49]:

Yeah, absolutely. I really love this. This, of course, taps into my policy background and my history undergraduate training, you know, and unemployment's a really fascinating program. It's about 90 years old already. And so, when we think about that from a technology perspective, that's a lot of decades of changing law and policy and implementation. And so, you know, as a program, it started in the early 20th century. It really is a form of social insurance. And so in most states, employers pay a small percentage of wages into this general fund.

Allison Johnson [00:07:30]:

It is insurance. And then, when individuals lose their jobs through no fault of their own, they are able to draw on that. Each state sets their own weekly amount that someone can get and it's based on their wage history. This really took off in the Great Depression and Wisconsin was actually the first state to establish a state-run unemployment program. And that was in 1932. And that is where one of my favorite figures in history, Frances Perkins, comes in. Frances Perkins was the first female cabinet secretary under FDR and she was tapped to lead the Department of Labor in the depths of the Great Depression. And it was in 1935, then with the Social Security Act, that unemployment became enshrined as a program that is administered by states with support and guidance from the federal government.

Allison Johnson [00:08:27]:

That law from 1935 still stands today. It is the cornerstone of unemployment insurance. And states have really taken on that laboratory of democracy idea and have experimented in lots of different ways, both in policy and technology. And, as you mentioned, you know, ties to the workforce side to help smooth those rough edges of life that we all can encounter no matter what we do in our own lives. It can strike any of us. And so this is to help ensure that there is some sort of safety net there to keep people from falling so far down.

Jess Carter [00:09:06]:

Yeah, so there's all these different levels. It gets confusing real quick. There's different types of unemployment. There's then state-funded programs for unique needs that states have, right? But it is, generally speaking, if you get approved, is it general federally approved, 26 weeks, is that right?

Allison Johnson [00:09:22]:

Yeah, that's the general average is 26 weeks. And states at their own maximum benefit amount is the. Is the lingo. And so that is an interesting challenge that we have for Open UI that we'll talk about in a minute is the variability. There are 53 jurisdictions that manage their unemployment. So all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Jess Carter [00:09:51]:

Okay, and when you say like each state sets their maximum benefit amount, what does that mean?

Allison Johnson [00:09:56]:

Yeah, so as we say internally, it's just math. It is just a formula and it's all publicly available. You can see what each state's formula is, but that calculates the amount that someone is eligible for based on their wages. Over the past several quarters, employers report into a state department of labor how many hours someone works and what their wages were. And then in the event that someone needs unemployment insurance, the state has that information, generally, and they use that, they apply their formula and that's how they determine that dollar amount.

Jess Carter [00:10:38]:

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't under. Don't realize that your determination is based on several quarters back. So it could be multiple employers of yours. So it's like, on a timeline chronologically, Jess worked at three different companies in the last, say, five quarters, right?

Allison Johnson [00:10:53]:

Right.

Jess Carter [00:10:53]:

And then she, she has a separation through no fault of her own, she applies for unemployment and the calculation is going to include that number of quarters. So it may be multiple employers they're reaching out to. It's complicated, right?

Allison Johnson [00:11:05]:

Very complicated. Multiple states. I live in D.C. and so we have lots of folks here who live and work in up to three different states. Virginia, D.C., Maryland. And so it, it does get complicated. And it can be hard for individuals to kind of know where to turn for those answers.

Jess Carter [00:11:23]:

Yeah, I want to get to Open UI real fast because I'm super excited about this. I'm so excited and I think everyone should be excited. Yeah, there's all this interoperability, then, between states because maybe you went on unemployment in one state, but you were working in another and they're going to share an agreement about who pays what percentage of your. So it just, it does get complicated. But there are unique needs in each state. And so, you know, if you look at when everybody was on a mainframe in the 70s, there is this history, this technical history too of, okay, like they were using paper during the Great Depression. Eventually everyone got to mainframes, then everyone started modernizing. But this isn't like, oh, I need another app that's like a Shopify app that has the exact same components and a cart and a shopping.

Jess Carter [00:12:05]:

This is like every state has such complex different legal policies, capital L, lowercase L, that they ended up sort of building unique custom solutions for each state. And in some of those states it's really flexible. In some of those states it's super not. Then there were sort of these companies in the market that have started developing what we call COTS products. Commercial off the shelf. So hey, we sell unemployment insurance systems. Do you want one? And while those can be advantageous because they're, they're highly effective and cheap and they usually mean you're going to get your federal reports, right?

Jess Carter [00:12:37]:

They also probably are not super flexible and don't allow for a lot of creativity for the states is what I'm assuming. So let's get into then, Open UI. So my quick understanding here is that NASWA received a two-year grant to strengthen unemployment insurance systems to focus on modern technologies and digital practices to make the state systems more accessible. So sort of how do we make those systems that came out in the early 2000s or maybe even in the last few years more resilient and flexible? Break that down for me. Like what are you really hoping to accomplish in that two years? What is Open UI?

Allison Johnson [00:13:13]:

Yeah, absolutely. It's a three-year grant. We're really looking at this initial grant as that down payment. This is a huge undertaking. We stand on the shoulders of a lot of earlier initiatives and a lot of earlier guidance and attempts to try and improve UI program administration and technology and improve services to the public. So Open UI, we are taking a slightly different approach than has been done in the past, while still really looking to those experiences. There was a brief period where states were looking at creating consortiums and so a few states would kind of band together and they would share that technology. And 15 plus years on, only one of those still remains.

Allison Johnson [00:14:06]:

Really for us, it's about building a community that reaches across all of the functions and needs of a UI program. And so part of that, the phrase I've been using lately is, you know, we're really out to democratize this information. Right now, the information about how any given state runs their UI program and certainly that the technology that they use to do that is kind of locked up in state employees, the vendor community as well, and the products that they've offered. But a lot of this information can be brought out into the open and it's giving us that opportunity to leverage all of that expertise. And when I say that, I really truly mean states, vendors, the advocacy community, the employer community. Looking really broadly, we're talking to procurement folks, we're talking to finance staff, to really understand it's not just about implementing that technology or writing those business requirements. So much else goes into it. And Open UI is focused on how we can bring those groups together in a more intentional and focused and ongoing way. So rather than those one off conversations you might have at a conference, we are creating that kind of central hub to be able to have those ongoing conversations and share.

Jess Carter [00:15:33]:

This is an enormous undertaking. You know, to your point, you mentioned the consortium. So these were multiple states who tried to band together if they were, usually if they were geographically nearby. And they had a lot of people that were probably across state borders and they thought, let's band together to build our system. So it wasn't state specific. And to your point, that's really complicated when they have different laws.

Allison Johnson [00:15:57]:

Yes.

Jess Carter [00:15:57]:

And different policies. And so a lot of them struggled and it sounds like I didn't realize there's only one that's still around. Which one's still around?

Allison Johnson [00:16:04]:

Re-employ. So Mississippi, Maine, and Connecticut.

Jess Carter [00:16:08]:

Yeah. So, you know, to your point, it feels like this sort of eternal struggle of how do we honor state policies and how do we make this unemployment, this federal program that's administered by states as flexible as it needs to be for the citizens living in the United States. And that's where NASWA is sort of this umbrella over all of it that provides this guidance and support. And so you guys are trying to figure out how is it broken down into the right Lego blocks or not, and if not, how do we change it? And then for you to bring up procurement, I mean, good for you. If people are not in the public sector, you might have the perfect solution. But if procurement isn't set up to help the state agencies get the right solution, and often, in my opinion, sometimes just to prevent a lawsuit, it's really important to make sure that you have that the people that are going to administrate RFPs and help vendor selections know and understand the value proposition of Open UI, right?

Allison Johnson [00:17:13]:

Exactly, yeah. One of the big challenges we have is that it's a, it's a pretty small marketplace right now for that core unemployment insurance benefit management process. And so it's really three to four vendors that have most of that space. And we've seen states reinforce this out of good intentions, out of risk reduction, by including phrases like, you must have implemented this in another state successfully in order to bid on this. Well, that automatically narrows the market. So there might be companies out there who are interested in taking on this problem.

Allison Johnson [00:17:53]:

They might have innovative ways to do this, but there's no way for them to even get a toehold. And so that is another place where I'm really optimistic Open UI can make a difference is that by putting that information out there, lots of people can look at this and say, like, I have an idea of how we can work on this.

Jess Carter [00:18:13]:

I feel like that procurement, you know, phrase came out of the number. I don't think people understand, too, the millions of dollars that was spent, especially in the early 2000s, where states were trying to get off mainframe and they failed and failed and failed. And so then they thought, okay, we're only going to work with vendors who've done it before. And that was probably the right call back then, but now there's some rigidity and there's, man, I want, like, in the infographic, in this podcast episode, I want, like, you with a cape flying around like, this is because I do. I really feel like you guys are thinking about the actual capital, like, our roadblocks. This is real innovation. How do you push Open UI in a space where your marketplace is pretty innately limited? You're talking through it right now. Like, do you have any other thoughts? I was just going to pick your brain because there's not, it's not like there's a bunch of companies that are like right there ready to access.

Jess Carter [00:19:07]:

This is going to take a minute. And what are you afraid of what that looks like in the next three years? Or is it if they fail, is that failure? Do you know what I mean?

Allison Johnson [00:19:15]:

Yeah, it is. And it's, it's tough that this is a really long game. You know, modernizations are really challenging, especially moving from a very monolithic architecture. And that could be on a mainframe that's in the basement of a Department of Labor.

Jess Carter [00:19:32]:

Yes.

Allison Johnson [00:19:32]:

Or it could be a COTS product like you mentioned, that's installed in a state cloud instance. The architecture is really the challenge here. It's a big mental shift for a lot of states, not only on the technology side, but also on that procurement side. So, you know, one of the most innovative things we, we are looking at doing, and we've seen some states start to experiment with this is writing shorter contract periods. Does it create a lot of overhead sometimes for the state that they have more to administer? Yes. But they can also say early on, you all don't get this, like, let's start over six months in rather than six years in. And so looking at that. But again, that involves so many other people than just your CIO office or your program office.

Allison Johnson [00:20:24]:

It's, it's auditors, it's folks at the Treasury Department who are issuing the checks and paying the invoices. It's a whole shift. And that is the real long game of changing how states think about technology. And not just states, I think government, broadly speaking that—I'm fond of saying, you know—modernization is not this end state to be achieved. It is an ongoing process. You're never just modernized in, I think in the same way that you are never just data-driven. You have to keep working at it. You have to be thinking, how can I improve this all the time. Are there new data sources I've never thought about that we could use and leverage?

Allison Johnson [00:21:07]:

Are there new technologies or old technologies that we thought didn't work, but actually maybe they would solve the problem?

Jess Carter [00:21:16]:

Right. Is a part of that figuring out what the Lego blocks are? Or do you already pre-perceive? Because part of me is like, okay, traditionally these agencies think of like three different things. There's benefits, how do we actually get people their cash. There's tax and then there's adjudication. Like, how do we actually make a decision about someone's benefits, right? Yeah, those are huge modules. And then part of the customization is also like, so just for, for anybody, like disaster on insurance is a different type of insurance. Different states are going to use that more often than other states and in different ways. Or like trade adjustment.

Jess Carter [00:21:53]:

This is a big fancy or maybe oversimplified term that basically means my job and type of job went away. I can't go find a different one. I need help getting a new type of skill to go get a new type of employment. I feel like that's a really interesting program, too, because it's changing faster than the last 90 years. So people understand when we talk about how, how do you modularize this and what are the right building blocks? I think part of that is, is it by, you know, function in the program? Is it by the federal programs themselves and the way the states need to use different programs at different levels. Like I picture almost like a lever you're pushing up. If you live in California, you're going to push up the disaster unemployment because you have fires and you have whatever versus if you're in the south and you have floods and hurricanes, right?

Jess Carter [00:22:42]:

And so I just, I'm curious about, like, do you have a hypothesis of any kind about what those modules, like, how big are they? Do you know what I mean?

Allison Johnson [00:22:50]:

Yeah. So we put out a request for information last summer asking the community, both vendors and interested experts, how many modules would you say there are? And we had a range of between two and 80. So there's some people said, you know, it's benefits and tax. Others broke it down into increasingly discrete pieces. We have been using all of that information, looking at how systems are built currently, and right now we are thinking there's probably in the range of 15 to 20 modules.

Jess Carter [00:23:31]:

That makes sense.

Allison Johnson [00:23:32]:

And one of the tenets that we agreed on as a project early on is that, you know, we have to let some of this reveal itself to us. If we come in with a really predetermined notion of what this is and is, isn't, we're going to miss things. We often speak in some of these ranges, knowing that it's going to change. There will not be consensus on everything. And so that's where the open—there's another interpretation of open in our name—and that is that we're really transparent and open about what we're doing. We have created a public repository in GitHub where we'll be posting all of this material for the community to engage with, give us feedback on and a lot of it is the storytelling. What didn't work, we thought this was a module.

Allison Johnson [00:24:21]:

Turns out as we went forward, we actually think it lives over here. And you know, explaining our work as we go, what we value and how we arrived at the decisions that we made. And I think really pulling back that curtain is one of the keys to our eventual success and not letting this live in a black box.

Jess Carter [00:24:46]:

I think your history and policy experience is serving this initiative so well. I mean, when you talk about data-driven leaders, you're leveraging the past, you're leveraging what the intentions of the program are and you're leveraging the realities of where the states are to figure out where to go. I mean, this is maybe the most, like, innovative approaches to public sector work. And you're right, it's the long game for sure. One of my sort of final questions is if I'm a state, they've already been through wars, they've already been part of a consortium that didn't work or they had a big failure and they weren't. We always joke like your job is to keep them out of the paper, like go do good government. And then you keep, you know, so get everybody paid and get the taxes. They've been through wars getting live. 

Jess Carter [00:25:31]:

With this three-year grant, how do you entice states to be, for super lack of better words, willing guinea pigs? How do you incentivize that? How do you make them? How are you getting them to lean in? Because I just imagine that would be really hard.

Allison Johnson [00:25:45]:

We've come in with the clear recognition and understanding that states are at all different points in their journey. There are a handful of states that are still running on mainframes. And you know what? Benefits are going out. There are states that are on COTS products that are written in net and the benefits are going out. The system is working. And I definitely want to emphasize that, that I feel like, especially since the pandemic, there's been a lot that UI is broken. And it has fractures. There are definite weak points and there are a lot of people working to address those particular weak spots. But our focus is going to be on states who are interested in innovating. And that really comes down to a combination of executive leadership that is interested in trying something new, that is willing to take some risks to buck the kind of conventional wisdom and stick it out.

Allison Johnson [00:26:44]:

We're also looking for states who are okay with taking a very small bite out of this work. We want to do small pilot efforts and we have some money in the grant to do that. So those could take any number of shapes. And we'll work with any state that is interested. We've had a number of states already reach out to us and say, we'd love to do something. We have this problem. Have you thought about doing that? We're at the point now where we're still trying to figure out what that escape velocity is. How do we know when we have enough to really start piloting? And we're getting there, we're getting closer.

Allison Johnson [00:27:21]:

And so we're really excited. The next few months are going to be a lot of exciting development. So maybe I'll come back in six months or a year. We can do part two.

Jess Carter [00:27:33]:

Yeah, cause I mean, yeah, you're right. Normally we're talking about something that already happened and why. This is actually a really interesting point to take a snapshot in this conversation and be like, here's what we're, here's what we're aiming at. Let's see if we hit it or not or what. What we learned along the way. Well, there are 4,000 questions I'd like to ask you, but for the sake of time, I think we covered a lot that I wanted to. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you feel like we should?

Allison Johnson [00:27:56]:

You know, I think I would probably just close with a phrase that's out there. But a former mentor of mine always loved to say, you know, nothing succeeds like success. So, we've got to start small, We've got to build trust. We've got to prove that this can work under real-world conditions. We don't want this to live in the abstract. And so that's really how we are focusing our works:  starting small and building out from there. Knowing that this is a marathon, we've got to kind of maintain that consistency and that those small successes start to build on each other and that is what will help continue to drive this forward long past this initial grant period.

Jess Carter [00:28:41]:

Yeah. When I hear you walk through this, Allison, I'm so glad that you're running this. There's a whole behind-the-curtain from this conversation of what data-driven leadership looks like. And I think there a pragmatic research bend, I would say, of your context and the way that you leverage it and how you're thinking about the appetite for those around you, the vendor, community, procurement, finance. There's so many avenues of. If you're not looking at those things, it's going to create a mountain in your way. I'm just so grateful for your strategy skills and your knowledge and passion for history. So let me ask you this.

Jess Carter [00:29:17]:

If people want to kind of follow along between this and maybe a future conversation, where could they learn more about you and this initiative?

Allison Johnson [00:29:24]:

Yeah, they can go to our website, which is naswa.org/open-ui-initiative. From there, you can see the resources and about us. We'll also, I think, hopefully include some details on that website to find our repo, and you can take a look at the work that we've been doing.

Jess Carter [00:29:43]:

Awesome. Yeah, we will add links to that in the show notes if people want to learn more. Allison, thank you for joining us. I so appreciate it.

Allison Johnson [00:29:49]:

Yeah, thank you. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate it.

Jess Carter [00:29:52]:

Awesome. Good luck.

Allison Johnson [00:29:54]:

All right. Thank you.

Jess Carter [00:29:55]:

Thank you guys for listening. I'm your host, Jess Carter. And don't forget to follow the Data-Driven Leadership wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review, letting us know how these data topics are transforming your business. We can't wait for you to join us on the next episode.