This article is written by Jessica Lax, Director of Business Experience at the New Jersey State Office of Innovation. Jessica plays a leading role in the Office of Innovation’s efforts to improve the experience of starting, operating and growing a business in the Garden State. She is a civic sector strategist that leverages human-centred design and interdisciplinary collaboration to create more just and impactful organisations, programmes and policies.

  • The problem: New Jersey businesses had to navigate a complex government system to start and operate their enterprise.
  • Why it matters: Rather than delivering a one-size-fits-all wholesale solution that would take several years to complete, the New Jersey Office of Innovation shifted conventional mindsets to quickly deliver an initial product within months, followed by a series of continuous, iterative improvements.
  • The solution: Using an agile, iterative approach coupled with human-centred design, the Office of Innovation is able to provide immediate value to users, ensure information is up to date and consistently respond to and prioritise the needs of the business community.

To simplify fragmented government services spread across 13 agencies and 1,550 forms for small business owners, the New Jersey State Office of Innovation did something government rarely does: debut a work in progress.

The Office of Innovation was tasked with making it easier to do business in the State. In practice, this was a monumental endeavour as it meant consolidating dozens of critical processes scattered across agencies and siloed from one another into a single, easy-to-use platform.

💬 Let the author know what you think about tackling government complexity by leaving a comment below

When the Office of Innovation began work on this project, New Jersey businesses looking to set up shop, pay taxes, or obtain funding had to navigate a complex bureaucracy, searching through multiple websites or speaking to several customer service representatives just to understand basic processes or requirements.

Businesses needed an easier way to navigate government regulations and opportunities.

To accomplish this, the State of New Jersey needed a different process, one that would require a major shift in its mindset, approaching projects as an iterative process with endless improvements rather than a single project with a clear start, middle and end.

This iterative approach would provide immediate value to users, ensure information is up to date and constantly respond to and prioritise the business community's most pressing needs.

How it started

With the help of our agency partners including the Business Action Center, NJ Department of Treasury, NJ Division of Consumer Affairs, NJ Economic Development Authority and NJ Office of Information Technology, our work-in-progress began with Business.NJ.gov, a static website that aggregates information from several agencies and explains how businesses can start, operate and grow in New Jersey.

Rather than spending years tinkering behind closed doors to build the “perfect” solution, we started small and smart.

To quickly get the site online, we replicated the architecture of similar websites built by Los Angeles and San Francisco. This was the simplest way to provide value to businesses, build our network and collect data on our users’ needs.

Next, businesses needed a single source to answer questions specific to their business, so we began unifying the customer service experience that was spread across multiple agencies. To quickly get users to the right agency with the right answers, we embedded an out-of-the-box chat tool on our website.

The live chat feature is managed by experts from the NJ Business Action Center who provide personalised information the website may not have and help route questions to other agencies like the NJ Department of Treasury or the NJ Economic Development Authority.

By monitoring these conversations, we uncovered content to add to Business.NJ.Gov, which in turn, reduced the number of chat conversations needed. During unprecedented times like Covid-19 or Hurricane Ida, the chat tool became an invaluable resource, helping businesses navigate complex and constantly changing information. During the peak of Covid-19, the chat supported over 3,000 businesses in one week.

Since then, we have further iterated on the live chat, leveraging generative artificial intelligence to help rapidly generate responses that are reviewed by staff before being sent to a customer. This frees up staff to focus on more complex questions, and further helps us improve our content. The live chat currently serves 300 to 600 businesses a week.

The chat tool and website positioned us well: we gained subject expertise and a community of users, creating a strong launchpad for investing in custom technology that could provide tailored recommendations based on a user’s specific needs. After answering a few basic questions, businesses now receive personalised guides on registration, a personalised tax calendar and recommendations on potential funding programmes.

But rather than waiting to create guides for every industry, we again launched a work-in-progress, a simple prototype featuring five of the most common industries.

As we expanded the personalised roadmaps, we continued to use the website and chat feature as testing grounds to evaluate what to build next. We could easily test content on the website to gauge interest before deciding to provide a more nuanced experience with a roadmap. We could also use the chat to find what we were missing — both in terms of market gaps, but also the user experience of our projects themselves.

For example, we saw businesses ask about the taxes they owe, so we added a custom tax calendar feature. Or we saw that users frequently asked, “I don't see my town listed in the dropdown,” as unincorporated towns were not listed. So we added information about how businesses could find the incorporated municipality where they operated.

How it’s going

In three years, we have had over four million users and 19 million page views, and in a survey, three out of four users said they were extremely likely to recommend the product to a friend.

Survey responses even showed that businesses previously too intimidated to register for taxes, thus delaying formalising their business, are now registering.

These results were possible in a short time frame because we launched our government modernisation project with a different mindset. Rather than spending years tinkering behind closed doors to build the “perfect” solution, we started small and smart. We launched quickly to immediately begin serving businesses in New Jersey and provide ourselves with testing grounds for developing more advanced technology.

For us, everything is a work in progress always to be iterated and improved upon in service of our users. The work and support we are providing the business community will never be done. We have said goodbye to the much-beloved ribbon cutting.

Done reading? Make sure to share your own thoughts on innovation in government by leaving a comment below ⬇️

(Image credit: Unsplash)