Investment Sprint
Canberra, Australia
16 – 20 March 2015
• The CSPA Investment Planning Sprint was held at the Australian
Bureau of Statistics in Canberra 16-20 March 2015.
• Nine statistical organizations were represented, six on-site and
three virtual.
• The sprint was organized under the sponsorship of the High Level
Group for the Modernization of Statistical Production and Services
(HLG).
• HLG have sponsored projects to develop core
frameworks supporting modernization which provide the
foundation for statistical organizations to standardise and share
knowledge (GAMSO, GSBPM, GSIM)
• HLG also sponsored projects over the past two years develop and
test a Common Statistical Production Architecture (CSPA) to
provide the foundation for the ability to create and
implement shared statistical services.
Sprint Outputs
• Brochures
• Benefits of CSPA and why you should
invest
• How statistical organisations can
transition to CSPA
• Presentations aimed at senior
executives, methodologist,
technologists and vendors
• 2015 Candidate list
• Papers
• Manifest
• Developing CSPA through a community
approach
• Guide to investment planning and
alignment
• CSPA: Taking sharing to the next level
• Updated value statement in CSPA
document
• Tools
• Portfolio Management Tool
Brochure – What is CSPA ?
We need to modernise
We have a burning platform with:
•
•
•
•
rigid processes and methods;
inflexible ageing technology;
increasing cost of traditional data collection methods;
inability to quickly respond to emerging information
needs;
• slow to harness new and alternative sources of data (such
as sensor, satellite);
• difficulty in attracting and retaining skilled staff in the
competitive labour market.
In an increasingly digital and data rich environment
statistical organizations are struggling to remain
relevant.
Modernisation blueprint exists
CSPA provides a reference architecture
to help each agency modernisation,
based on common standards:
• GSIM
• GSBPM
• DDI / SDMX
CSPA allows us to modernise our
environment and use existing
international solutions.
Current state
• Each year the HLG has approved a set of services to be
produced within CSPA.
• These lists have essentially been offers made by
individual agencies.
• The identified services have been delivered but not
widely utilised.
• The list of services has not been driven by the priorities
of statistical organisations
• Currently, there are a small number of individuals and
organisations that are highly influential through existing
HLG committee structures. For organisations outside of
these committee structures – it can be difficult to
participate.
Why aren’t existing services already being used?
• There are people to convince (the who):
• Business people
• IT people
• Enterprise Architect / the decision maker
• We need to convince them to (the what - and then sharing will follow):
• Sign on to CSPA (commit)
• Commit to reuse as a principle
• Other issues
• History - What's already in place, legacy systems
• Governance / control issues - People don't want to give up control of their
systems
Topics discussed at sprint
Sharing before CSPA
• Statistical organizations already participate in many international
engagement activities that facilitate sharing.
• Spontaneous, relationship driven engagements between statistical
organisations, unable to articulate how efficient we have been
• The main opportunities that we can
focus on:
• greater sharing of each statistical
organisation's ICT portfolio investment
and management plans
• finding and exploiting opportunities to
align engagements with some vendors
• earlier collaboration on innovative and
transformative approaches
• leverage modern technology
development practices and tools to
support physically dispersed teams
What does CSPA offer to sharing?
• It broadens the types of sharing to smaller
parts of IT solutions rather than the large
grained, complex pieces that have historically
been shared
• It builds on and enhances sharing of non-ICT
dimensions of a capability
• Sharing of any dimension of a capability can
occur with different degrees of maturity.
• With more maturity in sharing comes:
• more confidence in the sustainability of things
being shared
• more clarity in roles of providers and consumers of
the thing being shared
• greater visibility of the status of things being
shared.
Brochure – CSPA Community
Supporting the community
For the community to be effective, three
supporting streams of work are required:
Overarching governance –
Limited governance arrangements
are required to manage
participation in the
community. This would include a
process to new organisations entering the
community, principles which cover expected
behaviours for members and validation of the
output of development project.
Community fora to allow project
teams to share ideas, requirements
and test packages. This should
include virtual meeting spaces,
wiki, blogs and environments to share
investment plans and project collateral.
Administrative and technical
support to facilitate the work of
the community – including
virtual meetings, community
activities, assistance on
implementing CSPA and compilation of the
communities portfolio investment
plans. Currently this administrative support
is provided by UNECE.
Note that any requirement to create effective
projects are out of scope of this community
model, as these are a project specific
responsibility.
For more information about
CSPA, visit the CSPA wiki at:
www1.unece.org/stat/platform/
display/CSPA
Statistical
Modernization
Community
Building a Statistical Modernisation Community
• An active community seeking to leverage
Common Statistical Production
Architecture (CSPA)
• Allow statistical organisations to contribute
to achieving the vision of the High Level
Group (HLG).
• Individual organisations voluntarily identify
the nature of their contributions with the
support of a global community.
• The role of HLG is to provide stewardship
and to assist in steering the community to
deliver on the shared goal in an efficient
manner.
• They recognise the right of individual
organizations to determine their own
contributions based on their own priorities.
• HLG are the holders of the vision and they
are influential supporters of the work done
to help realise this goal.
Vision of an aligned and
collaboratively led
community.
Benefits of the Community Approach
• Effective approach to delivering statistical services, by lowering the
costs of overall production and minimising duplication by working
towards a shared goal.
• SO are able to optimise their level of contribution based on their
current capability and resourcing constraints.
• Working on project of mutual interest strengthens understanding,
design, implementation and adoption – ensuring statistical services
are more fit for purpose scalable and robust.
• The community can broker the exchange of information within the
community, linking members who share a common interested.
• The community openly shares learnings and implementation issues,
and seeks to overcome.
• Extract best practices round the world
• Create projects teams to solve your/common problems
• Robust and tested components can be delivered
Supporting the community
• Overarching governance – Limited participation governance
arrangements are required: process to new organisations
entering the community, principles which cover expected
behaviours for members and validation of the output of
development project.
• Community fora to allow project teams to share ideas,
requirements and test packages. This should include virtual
meeting spaces, wiki, blogs and environments to share
investment plans and project collateral.
• Administrative and technical support to facilitate the work of
the community – including virtual meetings, community
activities, assistance on implementing CSPA and compilation
of the communities portfolio investment plans. Currently this
administrative support is provided by UNECE.
Brochure – Taking sharing to the next level
Need to expose
investment plans
where we are
willing to
collaborate
Tailored level of
contribution allows
every country to
participate
Using capability based investment planning
• Business capabilities
• Language to describe needs for programme
driven investments.
• “An ability that an organisation, person or
system possesses".
• Organisation, people, processes, methodology,
standards and technology to achieve.
• Characterised as unique and independent
entities covering stable business functions in the
light of business strategy, which have been
abstracted from the organisational model.
• The CSPA investment planning makes use
of a standard Capability Reference Model
developed by the European Statisitical
System as the basis for describing planned
investments.
A portfolio management tool
A tool to capture\update the current state of
statistical organisations’ portfolios and highlight the
areas where investments are planned.
The tool assists statistical organisations to align
their portfolio to the CSPA capability reference
model.
The process of synthesizing SO investment plans uses the
CSPA portfolio management tool to create an overall picture
of the CSPA community’s ICT portfolio. This unified view
provides the CSPA community with:
•A view of investment coverage and gaps
•Areas of likely duplication or overlap
•Areas of vendor engagements
•A consolidation of the types of investments to be
undertaken (Innovation, Transformation, Harvesting)
How the type of investment changes sharing
• The CSPA Community will focus on the
investment plans of participating
statistical organizations to improve
sharing and alignment.
• These plans will, amongst other things,
classify capability investments based on
how well defined the capability is.
• Different investment types will also
influence the nature of sharing in the
following ways.
Vendors opportunities
• NSO community: International
statistical organisations,
Researchers, 10 billion USD, 200 +
organisations
• Statistical organizations will
increasingly adopt only CSPA
complaint services
• Offer CSPA compliant services –API
• Work with NSO for new services
• Ongoing modernization and
enhancement
• Increased market
Committing to action
• Manifest
• Formalisation of our commitment
• Defines expected behaviour
• Helps you drive change through the
organisation
• Maximises global participation in the
community
• Provides access to the strongest
capabilities from the community
• It makes sense for every organisation.
As active participants within the Statistical Modernisation Community, committed to
the success of that community, the organizations listed below:
1. Commit to:
a. Adopting community behaviours by:
i. Being willing to make compromises to take advantage of, and improve,
existing services (where it is sensible to do so)
ii. Actively contributing to collaboration
iii. Behaving as a trusted partner
iv. Sharing intellectual property and code with the community where possible.
b. Adopting an industry standard architecture in accordance with the CSPA,
including the Generic Statistical Information Model (GSIM) and
the Generic Statistical Business Process Model (GSBPM).
c. Sharing information about investment plans and application portfolios, looking
for opportunities to collaborate.
d. Identifying existing strong capabilities within each member organization, and
seeking to make them available as CSPA compliant
services with appropriate documentation.
e. Producing (or commissioning from third parties) new and enhanced CSPA
compliant statistical services in a manner that enables sharing
within the community
f. Prioritizing mechanisms that support and encourage community participation
when sourcing statistical capabilities
2. Affirm that the community will respect the individual sovereignty and requirements
of member organizations and groups
Would your
organisation
sign up to this?
Candidates identified so far
ESS Capability Model classification
Statistical Data Collection / Metadata collection and
management
Statistical Data Collection / Primary data collection
Statistical Data Collection / Collection of administrative
and other data sources
Statistical Processing / Statistical data preparation
Candidate
Coding / using machine learning
Country
Collaborators: Canada
Wrap BLAISE to surface capability services
Interviewer workload management
Web scraping
Collaborators: Australia
Edit and checking - BANFF
Imputation – CANCEIS
Validation rules specification (rules engine)
Probabilistic record linking
Implementers: Australia, Canada
Lead: Australia
Lead: Canada
Implementers: Australia
Admin data classification (e.g. for scanner
data)
FAME wrapped capabilities
Statistical Processing / Calculation and finalisation of
Collaborators: Australia
output
Statistical Dissemination / Flexible data access
Microdata access (Confidentialised analysis of Collaborators: Australia, Finland
provisioning
microdata)
Implementers: Canada
Statistical Analysis / Statistical output analysis & Statistical Geospatial visualisation
Dissemination / Flexible data access provisioning
Green rows mean that a country has volunteered to lead, orange rows
mean that countries would be in interested if someone else leads.
Is there anything that should be removed from the list?
Are these of interest to your organisation?
Two key groups need members
• Architecture Working Group (AWG)
• Enforce standards for definition, specification, implementation of services and
their publishing to the catalogue
• Maintenance and evolution of CSPA
• Technical Coordination Committee (TCC)
• elevating and supporting service implementation
• Improve
Next steps
• Reviewing and “signing” the Manifest for each participating
organization
• Discussion at the Workshop on the Modernisation of Statistical
Production to identify:
• statistical organisation who will design and build,
• collaboration partners and
• implementing statistical organisations.
• Assess individual organisation investment strategies,
modernisation plans, common priority areas, planned projects
• Use common portfolio management tool
• Use ESS capability framework (levels 1, 2, partner on 3)
• Evaluate the SO SOA readiness, use OSIMM model
• Evaluate the candidate list
Outcomes
• Communicate progress
• Getting more precise – Jakob / Ottawa sprint
• To get the investment – bunch of stuff you need – investment sprint
• Get the Manifest signed
• Look at the candidate list and provide fb –use Therese’s new list
• Solicit participants for the Architecture Working Group (ToR: enforce
standards for definition/specification/implementation/publishing to
catalogue, maintenance of CSPA; Technical Coordination Committee
(ToR: elevating and supporting implementation, improve)
Brochure – SOA Transition
Taking advantage of
CSPA Services when NOT
transforming
If you are not following the
transformation steps described, it is still
possible to use CSPA aligned
systems/services within your
environment.
The CSPA services can be called by
systems like other services or libraries
that you might have.
Using a Platform for Service
Communication makes this easier, but it
is not necessary.
Transitioning to
Service Oriented
Architecture
Existing systems, with little modification,
should be able to call the CSPA services,
accessing the functionality they provide.
There may need to be some
data/message translation to assist with
the use of the CSPA services.
For more information about CSPA,
visit the CSPA wiki at:
www1.unece.org/stat/platform/display
/CSPA
List of candidate service – ESS CM
Statistical Data Collection / Metadata collection and management
Coding / using machine learning
Statistical Data Collection / Primary data collection
Refactoring BLAISE
Interviewer workload management
Statistical Data Collection / Collection of administrative and other data sources
Web scraping
Statistical Processing / Statistical data preparation
Delete
Edit and checking - BANFF
Imputation – CANCEIS
Validation rules specification
Probabilistic record linking
Admin data classification (e.g. for scanner data)
Statistical Processing / Calculation and finalisation of output
FAME wrapped capabilities
Statistical Dissemination / Flexible data access provisioning
Microdata access (confidentiality on the fly)
Statistical Analysis / Statistical output analysis & Statistical Dissemination / Flexible data access
provisioning
Geospatial visualisation
Is there
anything that
should be
removed from
the list?
Are these of
interest to your
organisation?