DIME/ITDG Plenary February 2015/07/EN

Joint DIME/ITDG PLENARY

24 February 2015

Item 07 of the agenda

Modernisation Activities

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Modernisation Activities

  1. Recommendation for action by the Joint meeting

The Joint meeting of DIME and ITDG is invited

-to take note and give feedback on the work done and scheduled for 2015 under the coordination of the High Level Group for the Modernisation of Statistical Production and Services (HLG), coordinated by the UNECE, and the relation with the ESS Vision 2020 implementation.

  1. Background and brief history

The document presents the work run under the auspice of the High Level Group for the Modernisation of Statistical Production and Services (HLG), coordinated by the UNECE, and highlights the interlinks with the ESS Vision 2020 implementation.

2.1.Background[1]

The High-Level Group for the Modernisation of Statistical Production and Services (HLG) was set up by the Bureau of the Conference of European Statisticians in 2010 to oversee and coordinate international work relating to statistical modernisation. It promotes standards-based modernisation of statistical production and services. It reports directly to the Conference of European Statisticians and received its mandate from this body.

The mission of the HLG is to oversee development of frameworks, and sharing of information, tools and methods, which support the modernisation of statistical organisations. The aim is to improve the efficiency of the statistical production process, and the ability to produce outputs that better meet user needs.

Current members and organisation of the HLG are reported in Annexes 1 and 2.

The role of the HLG is formalised in its Terms of Reference. A broad vision and a strategy for implementing that vision have been formulated and agreed by the Conference of European Statisticians, and act as the mission statements shaping the HLG's work.

The objectives of the HLG are:

• To promote common standards, models, tools and methods to support the modernisation of official statistics;

• To drive new developments in the production, organisation and products of official statistics, ensuring effective coordination and information sharing within official statistics, and with relevant external bodies;

• To advise the Bureau of the CES on the direction of strategic developments in the modernisation of official statistics, and ensure that there is a maximum of convergence and coordination within the statistical "industry".

These objectives are met in a number of ways:

• annual expert group workshops bringing together representatives from as many relevant groups as possible, to collectively identify priorities and plan strategies while avoiding duplication or conflicting outcomes

• year-long projects which focus on one or two of the priorities identified by the workshops, that use participatory techniques to find rapid and collectively-developed solutions to the challenges of statistical modernisation.

2.2.HLG working approach

As illustrated in the previous paragraph, the HLG working arrangements foresees:

• Regular activities carried out by the modernisation committees (organisational frameworks, production and methods, products and sources, standards);

• Dedicated modernisation projects to be developed usually within a year span. These projects are coordinated by the Executive Board (in 2013 CSPA – Common Statistical Production Architecture; for 2014 CSPA implementation and Big Data – see Annex 3 and 4). The working areas for dedicated projects are selected by the HLG in its meeting in November of each year on the basis of the progress achieved and the outcome of the discussions in the HLG workshop (held also in November each year).

The HLG coordinates both strands of activities.

Eurostat and several European NSIs actively participate in the modernisation committees, in the Big Data project and in the Executive Board.

2.3.HLG initiatives and ESS Vision 2020

HLG initiatives and the ESS Vision 2020 both aim at the modernisation of the statistical production system and pay attention to the different drivers and challenges towards such modernisation. From the ESS point of view, the participation and contribution to the HLG activities is complementary to the ESS Vision 2020 and national modernisation programmes, maximising the synergies with modernisation activities at Eurostat and ESS level.

The HLG activities reflect a general trend towards modernisation that shapes activities in several NSIs and international organisations dealing with statistics. In particular, it recognises and builds upon the efforts put in place (e.g. modernisation programmes at NSI level such as the ABS 2017, ISTAT 2015, ONS 2022 and at ESS level - ESS Vision 2020, …) and promotes the sharing of best practices in modernising statistical production processes and organisations.

HLG activities shares common aspects with the ESS Vision 2020:

• Same basic assumptions in the approach to modernisation of statistical production processes;

• Standard-driven approach;

• Cooperative models for the development of initiatives;

• Attention to governance aspects;

• Attention to new data sources (e.g. Big Data);

• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) orientation.

2.4.2015 work and coordination with Eurostat and ESS Vision 2020 activities

From an ESS perspective, the developments of HLG activities need to be coordinated with the ESS Vision 2020 initiatives and with national and Eurostat modernisation activities. In this respect, Eurostat pays particular attention to enhance the coordination with Member States and to avoid double work in common areas. On the other side, most of the contributions provided by Eurostat to HLG activities rely on outcomes and actions undertaken under the ESS Vision 2020.

In particular, the close relationships emerge in the following areas:

• Big Data – in line also with the UN Global Working Group initiative;

• SOA – with Eurostat taking the leadership in establishing the hosting of the catalogue of CSPA compliant services;

• Standards – with a relevant ESS contribution to the methodological and practical developments in areas such as SDMX, CSPA, GSBPM, GSIM and DDI developments;

• Enterprise architecture;

• Organisational frameworks;

• GAMSO (Generic Activity Model for Statistical Organisations) – the equivalent to the ESS Vision 2020 GEMS (Generic Enterprise Model for Statistics).

These common interests raise the need for a strong coordination in the ESS towards these two strands of modernisation. In particular:

• Global standards – governance for endorsement and maintenance;

• Need to streamline the input from the ESS to the HLG initiative and to strengthen the cooperation;

• Increasing awareness and usage of CSPA;

• EU HLG members input to the work of the HLG;

• Pilot projects for Big Data;

• Innovation.

The work programme of the HLG for 2015 foresees:

• Regular work of the modernisation committees

• Priority tasks for dedicated projects:

  • Big Data continuation – proof of concept
  • Use of the sandbox to continue what has been started but also focussing on producing concrete output.
  • Coordination of skills development, capacity building and training in the use of Big Data, as well as maintaining the inventory of Big Data activities.
  • Continued close coordination with the work of Eurostat and the UN Global Working Group. Activities should also support the “data revolution for sustainable development” initiative of the UN.
  • CSPA continuation – operational
  • Governance.
  • Support for development and implementation of CSPA services.
  • Determining the services to be developed, and the appropriate development model.
  • Overseeing the transfer of the service catalogue to a production environment hosted by Eurostat.
  • Mobile devices
  • Mobile devices as sources of data, data collection tools, and dissemination channels (activity to be taken forward as part of the work programme of the Modernisation Committee on Products and Sources).
  • Communication
  • The HLG decided to establish a cross-cutting task team under the Executive Board, to take forward the tasks on communicating modernisation activities.

For more information see

  1. Next steps

During 2015, the ESS will continue to follow and participate to the HLG activities through the involvement of the concerned representatives in relation to the modernisation work done in the context of the ESS Vision 2020 and modernisation activities in Eurostat and in Member States. At the same time, Eurostat will work in close cooperation with UNECE to streamline these activities at ESS level and to avoid overlaps and duplication of work. To this purpose, Eurostat will pro-actively contribute to the set-up of the agendas and work programme of the concerned HLG bodies.

Dates / Event
23-27 February / Information Architecture Sprint - Ottawa
4 March / UNSC dedicated event
9 March / NTTS 2015 satellite event UNECE/HLG project on Big data
16-20 March / CSPA Investment Sprint
15-17 April / Workshop on the Modernisation of Statistical Production
5-7 May / Workshop on International Collaboration for Standards-Based Modernisation

Annex 1: HLG members

The HLG members are

  • Pádraig Dalton (Ireland) - Chairman
  • Trevor Sutton (Australia)
  • Wayne Smith (Canada)
  • Emanuele Baldacci (Italy)
  • Bert Kroese (Netherlands)
  • Park, Hyungsoo (Republic of Korea)
  • Genovefa Ružić (Slovenia)
  • Mariana Kotzeva (Eurostat)
  • Martine Durand (OECD)
  • Lidia Bratanova (UNECE)

The chairs of the Statistical Network Steering Group, the Executive Board, and the modernisation committees participate in HLG meetings as observers.

The UNECE also provides the secretariat.

Annex 2: HLG organisation

The HLG is organised according to the structure reported in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1: HLG organisation

For more details and membership of the different bodies see

Annex 3: 2014 HLG project on Big Data

Project: The Role of Big Data in the Modernisation of Statistical Production

This project was a collaborative approach, bringing together over 70 experts from national and international statistical organisations around the world to identify and tackle the main challenges of using Big Data sources for official statistics. The project ran from January to December 2014, and had three main objectives:

• To identify, examine and provide guidance for statistical organizations on the main strategic and methodological issues that Big Data poses for the official statistics industry

• To demonstrate the feasibility of efficient production of both novel products and ‘mainstream’ official statistics using Big Data sources, and the possibility to replicate these approaches across different national contexts

• To facilitate the sharing across organizations of knowledge, expertise, tools and methods for the production of statistics using Big Data sources.

To deliver to the objectives above, the project established the following individual work packages:

• Work Package 1: Issues and Methodology.

• Work Package 2: Shared computing environment ('sandbox') and practical application.

• Work Package 3: Training and dissemination.

• Work Package 4: Project management and coordination.

To deliver Work Package 1 the project established three ‘task teams’, addressing the Big Data issues identified as the most relevant for official statistics: Privacy, Partnerships and Quality.

Practical results in Work Package 2 were delivered by the Sandbox Core team and eight ‘experiment teams’, structured around the following topics: Consumer price indices, mobile phone data, smart meters, traffic loops, social media data on mobility, public sentiment analysis, job portals and web scraping.

Annex 4: 2014 HLG projects on CSPA implementation

In 2014, the activities on the CSPA implementation have been carried out in the following three workpackages:

  • WP1 service implementation exercise, based on proposals received from countries (see Table A.4.1).
  • WP2 service catalogue design and usage, definition of services, certification: an architectural team and a catalogue team carried out work inside the CSPA implementation project and Eurostat contributed by migrating the prototype UNECE hosted service catalogue towards EC/Eurostat hosting.
  • WP3 architecture documentation development - to support CSPA implementation projects in organisations. e.g. “hands on CSPA”, guidelines)

Table A.4.1. CSPA implementation exercise 2014 - projects

Service / Organisations
Confidentialized analysis of microdata / Australian Bureau of Statistics
Statistics Canada
Error correction / Istat
Linear error localisation / Statistics Netherlands
Linear rule checking / Statistics Netherlands
List statistical classifications / Statistics Norway
Retrieve statistical classification / Statistics Norway
Sample selection / Statistics Netherlands
SDMX transform / OECD
Seasonal adjustment / Australian Bureau of Statistics
INSEE
Statistics New Zealand
Statistical chart generator / OECD

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[1] Information derived from the HLG website