How Indiana’s data chief helps tackle policy issues

Josh Martin has been leading the Indiana Management Performance Hub since it opened in 2014 and was given the mission of using data science and analytics to help solve state policy challenges.

Since then, demands on the agency have grown as the state has come to depend more on data to tackle huge problems such as the pandemic. The agency’s staff also has grown from a handful of workers to 36.

Martin, now the state’s chief data officer, recently sat down with IBJ to discuss his agency’s growing role and his effort to make all state agencies data-proficient.

Your most recent project was the launch of the Indiana Fuel Vehicle Dashboard. What’s the goal behind this initiative?

That’s a partnership between the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Indiana Department of Transportation and the Office of Energy Development. There’s a lot of infrastructure funding that’s become available that’s focused on electric vehicles and alternative fuels, and the public is very interested in knowing what that landscape really looks like.

There are a lot of different fuel types in there that are kind of interesting. It’s like, “Whoa, someone’s running stuff on biomass?” But it’s also going to help us with planning better services for our [residents] as more people move to electric vehicles or hybrid vehicles. Where do we start positioning chargers? How do we figure out how we can continue to better fund our road systems? The dashboard is for both public information and internal operational awareness.

One of the reasons then-Gov. Mike Pence established the Management Performance Hub was to examine the state’s high infant mortality rate. I’m curious what progress has been made on that front, and have there been any policies adopted based on data you’ve gathered?

That was a big starting point. When you’re starting a big data initiative, you need to figure out how to get access to data, leveraging data, building trust, building collaborative opportunities. So you find a good project that you can work on that’s really meaningful and impactful and crosses different agencies.

All of these agencies are providing great services, but they don’t have as much opportunity to collaborate across the board. They’re really focused on their day job and providing citizen services. From our work on infant mortality, there was more funding that was leveraged from the General Assembly and appropriated to the state health department, and that led to what is “My Healthy Baby,” which is a collaborative effort between the Department of Child Services and the Department of Health.

We found that what moms needed was more services and support. They weren’t getting to prenatal visits or the help they needed. “My Healthy Baby” has been a tremendous effort between those organizations from a collaborative standpoint to provide those services.

(The state’s infant mortality rate has consistently been above the national average. It spiked to 7.5 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2016 and stood at 6.7 in 2021. The national average was 5.9 in 2016 and 5.4 in 2021.)

One of the other reasons for launching the hub was to address high recidivism rates. What accomplishments have been made in that regard?

With infant mortality and recidivism, there’s a big lag. The recidivism is a three-year measuring process, and you have to wait until a year after childbirth to measure infant mortality. So on some of these issues, the needle moves slow. But what we’ve seen is, recidivism has now dropped down below 30% in Indiana [from 37% in 2014]. Data alone doesn’t replace the subject-matter expertise that we have with our caseworkers at the Department of Correction, but it is a supplement to help them make better decisions. So giving them access to data is helpful.

Speaking more generally about the data-driven world we live in, how can data influence decision-making at the Statehouse?

The most specific example is everything that we did during COVID. I had my first child on March 15, 2020. I got home from the hospital on March 17, and two days later, I got a phone call. They said, “Hey, we need you back to work to help with the data infrastructure and bringing this together.” The public health system’s data infrastructure wasn’t built to do real-time event-based streaming—it was built to report to the CDC after the fact. We needed real-time information.

So I worked a little over 70 days straight during COVID with a newborn at home to build these different data pipelines. We started doing more forecasting, providing as much information to the governor and his team on what we were seeing from a testing standpoint.

We got into contact tracing, testing, anything we could do to support decision-making efforts and providing data to the public. We were running not only a dashboard that most people were receiving, but we were also putting information on our open data hub.

From a budgetary standpoint, we were also asked to provide transparency on the large amounts of federal dollars that were coming out during the COVID period. We created two dashboards for the Office of Management and Budget and the State Budget Agency that showed where that funding was coming from and how it was being expended and drawn down. The Legislature was very interested in understanding where that money was going.

Do you keep an eye on what other states are doing in terms of analyzing data?

There is a state chief data officer network that’s run out of the Beeck Center in Georgetown [University in Washington, D.C]. I think Indiana was the seventh state to have a chief data officer when we were codified in 2017 and that position was created, and now we’re approaching 40 states that have chief data officers or something very similar within their state governments.

Indiana has been so fortunate to be way ahead of the curve. Most states are learning from us. Iowa is coming out here in a couple of weeks. The chief data officer from Michigan came down for our annual Data Day, and I’m on regular calls with other states, helping them learn from what we did.

Our statute that created [the Management Performance Hub] has been a model for a number of different states and how we’re organizationally structured because we’re not an IT shop. We are the envy of the nation. It’s one of the things we’re way out in front of. A lot of other chief data officers are in the IT shop, but the IT shop has a lot of other things on their plate like cybersecurity, keeping the networks going. Data is really closer to business than it is the IT shop. So we have a very symbiotic relationship.

There is a lot of buzz right now around artificial intelligence. I imagine your office uses some AI tools, but how are you thinking about AI and how it will shape the work you do in the future?

AI is a big umbrella. We do use machine learning and algorithms for doing probabilistic record linkage, so we have small tooling that is there. But I think the big thing everybody misses is that you can’t do AI if you don’t have good-quality data and good data governance. If you don’t know where your data lives, what data is in there, who’s responsible for it … . What are the legal ramifications for using it? What are the regulatory requirements around it? Having that information is like a prerequisite. You need to know algebra before you go and take statistics.

So that’s one of the focuses that we have here over the next 18 months … how do we enhance data governance across the state? So we created a data-proficiency program for state employees that has been tremendously successful to figure out best practices that we need to be focusing on to help look at data-cataloging tools.

You know, we have a system that catalogs our tables and furniture, our computers, but we don’t have a metadata system of record. Metadata is the data about the data. So that’s something that we really noticed over the course of the pandemic. I don’t want to work 70 days straight the next time something like this happens.•