The role of the Central Statistics Office (CSO) is to provide independent statistics about Ireland’s society, economy, and environment, which helps support evidence-based decision making. Deloitte has been working with the CSO to future-proof the census model and improve business surveys by adopting intelligent digital technology to take it online.
Richard Nunan, a partner in Cloud Engineering, explains that Deloitte’s involvement with the CSO started when they sought a partner to help them use the public cloud to run their business and digital census platform. “The traditional paper-based survey model was time-consuming. It was evident that the digitisation of the process using intuitive digital mechanisms would have numerous benefits – for the CSO, for respondents, and for the environment, in terms of data quality and improving user experience.”
As well as the CSO’s responsibility for the national census, it also works on a wide range of business surveys. With the size and scope of this particular project in mind, the CSO chose to address the digitisation of their business surveys first.
Kevin Germaine, who worked on the project, says that “using new technology to digitise the business surveys had numerous benefits, including taking the onus off the respondent and making answering much more intuitive. The changes also reduced the amount of paper used as well as the transport requirement involved in traditional surveys. This made significant financial savings possible; and ultimately delivered much more reliable and accurate responses in real-time.”
Crucially, there was a much quicker turnaround for the surveys, and the CSO also had instant access to metrics, such as how many people had opened the business survey, how many had started to respond, and if there were any common areas of difficulty in the survey.
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic proved to be a huge step forward for the CSO in surveying the general population digitally. And because the speed of the response was critical for national health and wellness planning, the digital format of surveys meant that major decisions could be made almost instantly.
This summer, Deloitte and the CSO came together in pilot mode to digitise the National Census, with a sample of 25,000 respondents. The positive impact that accrued from the business surveys and the Covid-19 surveys are now set to be multiplied significantly, meaning Ireland’s national census has been catapulted into an exciting new age where access to quality data is quicker, more efficient and less onerous.
Norma O’Connell from the CSO says the changes represent a huge step forward. “The implementation of eQ in the CSO has been transformational, it is a world class digital data collection system where all CSO business surveys have been implemented providing a device independent system with many features to aid our respondents. eQ is highly scalable with a robust solution for all our surveys which has the potential for large scale surveys such as Census.”
