3. Assessing digital transformation progress | Digital Transformation of National Statistical Offices | OECD iLibrary

Digitisation and digitalisation are often used interchangeably. However, there are critical differences between them. This chapter explores the meaning behind digitisation and digitalisation and how to measure them. The chapter also outlines a methodology to evaluate the state of digitalisation in national statistical offices.

3.1.

What is the digital transformation of statistical systems?

What is the digital transformation of statistical systems?

While the terms digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation are widely used, often interchangeably (Bloomberg, 2018[34]), there are critical differences between them in terms of their scale and objectives (Figure 3.1).

Digitisation mainly relates to the transformation from analogue to digital data (e.g. scanning of paper documents, with or without optical character recognition). This is an obvious and mostly technical step on the path towards digital societies, only loosely (but not necessarily) impacting actual working processes and interactions. Digitisation makes the information, not the process, digital (Bloomberg, 2018[34]).

Digitalisation is a more complex endeavour whereby digital applications and processes leverage digital data. Typically, digitalisation will impact isolated or siloed business processes. In the world of official statistics, these could include being the switch from a paper-based survey to a fully digital process involving electronic data collection, storage, processing, analysis and dissemination. Successful digitalisation often results in sectoral improvements in terms of data quality and timeliness and efficiency gains. Such siloed and sectoral improvements, however, lack horizontal integration (e.g. with other statistics or surveys). Reusing the outputs and results of a fully digitalised survey in more traditionally computed statistics will often require some ad hoc manipulation of the data for which formal processes and tools have not necessarily been implemented, and this can lead to unexpected complications and limitations. Although digitalised statistical processes offer many advantages over their fully analogue counterparts, it must be recognised that their lack of transversality can also cause unwanted and unplanned challenges in the future.

For a long time, NSOs have used information technology (IT) to improve the efficiency of statistical processes. However, such innovations have remained confined only to specialised areas, creating islands where IT tools are less likely to interoperate, share data, and work together as a cohesive system. This fragmented environment of individual and disparate systems created what many researchers called silos within NSOs. Silos restrict the clarity of holistic vision, meaning that NSOs have struggled to have the significant impact desired with regard to using digital technologies. These reasons include a mismatch between IT systems and actual processes and a lack of seamless flow of data across its lifecycle (PARIS21, 2021[1]).

• Digital transformation aims to address these very challenges by looking holistically at the processes at stake within the whole institution. A digital transformation is a fundamental change in the way statistics are produced. It is more than only introducing and using digital technologies. Rather, it should be seen as a technology-aided deep rethinking of the core work of an institution. Bosnia and Herzegovina provides a very telling example (MakStat, 2020, p. 87[24]): The digital transformation of the national statistical system is being hampered by the complex institutional setup of three statistical institutions with different structures, each using different tools and having insufficient resources. A technological transformation alone cannot achieve much here, and the core governance and functioning of the statistical system need to be redesigned to accommodate the integrated deployment of digital approaches. Similarly, the key challenges and constraints to comprehensive digital transformation identified by the National Statistics Office of Mongolia key are more organisational than purely technological [country example Mongolia]. Chapter 3 highlights the need for a multi-dimensional approach toward digital transformation.

Figure 3.1.

Digital organisation

Source: Authors