Q&A: How Ferris Ramadan Is Helping Arizona Build a Statewide Longitudinal Data System

States collect an enormous amount of administrative data that can sharpen service delivery and drive evidence-based policymaking and resource allocation. But the data needed to answer priority policy questions sits across several different agencies with different governance protocols and statutory requirements. Because this data is not connected, it is hard to understand how government programs complement one another or how an earlier intervention affects individuals later in life.

To address this challenge, states are establishing statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS). These central repositories can link administrative data across programs from cradle to career, revealing how early childhood interventions shape educational attainment or how job training programs relate to career advancement. In connecting these dots, these systems can help states see, for instance, whether a job training grant actually led to a better-paying job three years later — something no single agency could show on its own.

Ferris Ramadan is the Program Director for Arizona’s Longitudinal Data System at the Office of Economic Opportunity. In this role, he manages the processing and development of data pipelines and collaborates with state agencies, workforce development partners, and state education institutions on data sharing and research. We connected recently for a discussion on advances and challenges in building out a SLDS.

Thomas: What data does Arizona’s longitudinal data system currently collect, and what would you like to see included?

Ferris: Unemployment Insurance (UI) wage records are the backbone of our system. We currently enhance those with industry codes, and that’s what we use to perform the core of our analyses. We also have licensure records from the Department of Transportation to enhance our matching pipeline, and records from the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Title 1 to 4, which covers various workforce trainings and services.

An important opportunity for continued growth is expanding the K-12 and university records in coordination with the Arizona Department of Education. We already have data sharing agreements supporting community college and K-12 Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs and are continuing to broaden education participation across the platform.

Arizona’s system is housed in an Economic Opportunity Agency rather than an education department. How has that shaped how the system was built and how you operate?

It basically changes the questions and research priorities that we have. We’re starting from a workforce-oriented perspective and focused on outcomes: Where are Arizonans employed? How much are they making? It makes our data system more federated and use-case driven, expanding when an agency or institution has a clear reason to participate. When there are funding opportunities, like Workforce Pell or more recently, the Rural Health Transformation Program, that gives us these carrots to incentivize these institutions to participate in the platform. I like to say that “we don’t have the right to go spelunking with other people’s records.” And so, if we want to move forward with any project, our data governance model requires us to establish data use agreements, explicitly outlining the scope of the research being conducted with the data partners’ records. That use-case-driven approach has already produced meaningful wins: partnering with Pima Community College to support the development and publication of their student outcomes dashboard, publishing research around WIOA Title I outcomes, and establishing data-sharing agreements across Arizona’s community college system.

Getting agencies to share data is often harder than the technical build. How have you approached building data sharing agreements and trust across agencies?

We really have to be thoughtful about the way we approach agencies. This isn’t always a requirement for them. And that means when our agency first has a conversation with folks, it doesn’t start with the technical ability for us to execute, but instead, asking them “what is their value-add for participating in the platform?” At the end of the day, we are trying to be of service to these institutions. Oftentimes, other agencies don’t think about SLDS as something that exists, or something that they can leverage. And so we often share examples of what we’ve done before with existing partners, and then we can move forward with figuring out what the minimum necessary data are to drive insights. We want to make sure that a data partner feels very confident that we’re handling the records with the highest standard from both a security perspective and administrative posture. Trust is built by showing restraint.

What’s a question people keep asking that represents an opportunity for the system to expand? How are you thinking about addressing it?

The number one question is about enhanced wage records. For background, this is basically additional information on occupation and hours worked that would be added to the unemployment insurance data. It provides huge benefits to a state longitudinal data system because then you’re able to link in the other half of your labor market information (wages and employment) and provide more clarity on the profile of the state’s workforce. As an Economic Opportunity Agency, our role is to work with the partners that have the authority to make that decision and identify a path forward.

With Workforce Pell, there are now requirements to validate that a trained participant is employed within a related occupation, which creates a strong opportunity to improve enhanced wage records and strengthen how states measure employment outcomes.

There are also additional opportunities to expand the range of partners represented in our system. One of the biggest opportunities for our agency would be health licensure records, and we have great partners at the Arizona Department of Health Services moving this forward. Current statutes create limitations on how those records can be shared, as they do for healthcare data, so our agency continues to work within those requirements while exploring pathways that could support responsible data integration in the future.

What advice would you give to other state data leaders who are just starting to establish a longitudinal data system?

I would say this goes back to your question about how we approach trust across agencies. And I would say it starts with questions and not the architecture. You can have a very technically impressive system, especially using cloud-based resources, but it doesn’t matter for folks outside of that direct space who just want to protect the records and who want deliverables from that data. So, our approach has been to ask for the minimum data that’s necessary to show that we’re building things thoughtfully. The questions that we ask are really reinforcing that we’re creating a value-add for these different providers.

And then I would also focus on incremental growth: focusing on where you can definitively make a minimum working product in order to have a proof of concept that you can show to the legislature or the governor’s office or to other state agencies. This is going to help you establish that buy-in faster than just having these big ideas that you’re not executing on.

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