In a digital and information driven society, official statistics is an increasingly precious public good that has to respond to the needs of many different users. To accomplish their official mandate, Statistical Organisations need to strive for adapt to major developments in society and the economy; they have to stay relevant becoming modern.
They have to produce increasingly high-quality statistics with higher timeliness and greater detail, competing with several parties while trying, at the same time, to deal with reduced resources. They have also to speed statistical production and make it more effective by taking advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies and using new data sources: intensive exploitation of administrative records, big data and geospatial data. Statistical Organisations have to become more flexible and agile, increasing efficiency of production processes to free up resources for new developments.
How should they proceed to implement this vision? What are the key areas of strategic innovation? The assumption is that modernisation can mean different things to different people, depending on their starting point. The level of maturity can vary across organisations and across domains. At the national level, Statistical Organisations may create their own institutional strategy, in line with their capacity to change priorities, requirements and despite the constrains deriving from national laws.
This issue briefly examine these questions, starting from the challenges the official statistics community is facing and those that can be expected for the next future. Focus is also on the approach to statistical modernisation of a country as Tunisia, the beneficiary of the EU Twinning project “Modernisation de l’appareil statistique tunisien” that Istat is currently implementing in partnership with Insee as leader.