HLG-BAS High-Level Group on Strategic Developments in Business Architecture in Statistics Steven Vale and Marlen Jigitekov, UNECE

Background New UNECE group, created by the Bureau of the Conference of European Statisticians in 2010 Mission: To oversee and guide discussions on developments in the business architecture of the statistical production process, including methodological and information technology aspects

HLG-BAS Members Netherlands - Gosse van der Veen (Chairman) Australia - Brian Pink Italy - Enrico Giovannini Slovenia - Irena Krizman United States - Katherine Wallman Eurostat - Walter Radermacher OECD – Martine Durand UNECE - Lidia Bratanova Observers METIS – Alice Born (Canada) MSIS – Rune Gløersen (Norway) SAB – Marton Vucsan (Netherlands) The members of the HLG-BAS are all heads of national or international statistical organisations. The chairs of the 3 main UNECE groups related to this work, participate in the HLG-BAS as observers.

The first main task of the HLG-BAS was to work out its relationship with all of the other groups (approx 25) and initiatives relevant to the enterprise architecture for statistical production. This diagram shows the groups identified and their relationship with the HLG-BAS.

Inventory of Groups To make the task of coordination easier, the groups identified in the diagram on the previous slide were invited to complete a simple template describing their organisation, objectives and outputs. The results have been published on a UNECE wiki (address on last slide). Here is an example of the information provided.

HLG-BAS Strategic Vision To be presented to the Conference of European Statisticians on 14 June Perspective Challenges Vision The following slides are based on that presentation The next task of the HLG-BAS was to develop a strategic vision to help coordinate the activities of all these groups, and provide agreed common goals. This vision will be presented to the heads of national and international statistical organisations from around the world, at the meeting of the Conference of European Statisticians next week in Geneva. The following slides will give you an idea of the main points of the strategic vision.

Some perspective: The internet has 1800 exabytes of data in 2011 The amount of data in the world is growing rapidly. It has increased by a factor of ten in the last 5 years.

We live in exponential times 50,000 exabytes by 2020 27 fold growth in the next 9 years ... and it is forecast to grow by 27 times by 2020. And it will probably keep on growing.

Are these data interesting? Probably 99.9% are videos, photos, audio files, text messages and other nonsense But that still leaves 1,800,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of potentially relevant data However, a lot of this growth is due to videos, photos, audio files, text messages, and other communications that are of little interest for statistics. But even if only 0.1% of data are interesting, this is still a huge amount.

Paradigm shift In 1990 data were scarce, interpretation was readily available In 2011 data are everywhere, interpretation is scarce We will of course need new methods to cope with this volume of data, our existing tools and processes will probably not be sufficient. The main issue will be to find ways to interpret these data and draw useful statistics from them.

High Level Group Vision: We have to re-invent our products and processes and adapt to a changed world Given these challenges the HLG-BAS thinks it is time to act, and to do so in a coordinated way, as a global statistical community. We have to change the way we produce statistics, because we have no choice. The world is changing and we have to adapt.

Industrialise statistical production Our processes will have to be industrialised. We can’t afford to maintain different systems and processes for each type of statistic. Industrialisation means a chain of very powerful tools to produce products in a reproducible way. Human inputs are reduced and moved from processing to design and analysis activities. This will result in Common Generic Industrialised Statistics; the blue square. The cornerstones of this framework are the GSBPM, The Generic Statistical Business Process Model developed by the UNECE METIS group, together with the GSIM, the Generic Statistical Information Model, which is being developed in collaboration between the “Statistical Network”, led by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the CORE ESSnet project, which you will hear about in a later presentation. To complete the framework, standardised methods and technology are also needed. The European Statistical System Sponsorship on Standardisation, and the UNECE Sharing Advisory board will provide important inputs in these areas.

On Process: Industrialise Standards save money New methods and architectures for large volumes of data Minimise labour, innovate Collaborate to spread the burden Standardising will save money, which we need for developing new methods and processes to cope with the large volumes of data. We also have to reduce the amount of labour involved in statistical production. Because the investment needed will be substantial, it makes sense that statistical organisations should collaborate to spread the burden.

Next steps Agreement on “strategic vision” by heads of national and international statistical organisations at the Conference of European Statisticians Autumn 2011: workshop for representatives of the groups in the inventory to develop a strategy to implement the vision Hopefully the Conference of European Statisticians will endorse this vision next week. As a next step the HLG-BAS plans to hold a workshop for representatives of the groups identified in the inventory, to explain the vision and to develop a strategy on how to implement it in a coherent way.

Questions. steven. vale@unece. org www1. unece Questions? steven.vale@unece.org www1.unece.org/stat/platform/display/hlgbas Here is my e-mail address and the url for the wiki where you will find more information about the HLG-BAS. Do you have any questions?