Page 144 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS122 Elise C. et al.
on working modes, allowing different profiles to work effectively together. In
collaboration with the IT department, a team of two persons from the division
and one from the IT department won the second prize of the Big Data
Hackathon organised by Eurostat during the New Techniques and
Technologies for Statistics conference in March 2017.
Datascience innovation for statistical production and studies is a crucial
activity for maintaining high-quality, meaningful and relevant statistics, and is
pledge of productivity gains. The visibility of its innovative works is also
essential for the NSI to reinforce public confidence. In 2016, INSEE’s medium-
term strategy (INSEE 2025) recommended the creation of a unit dedicated to
R&D for promoting reactive lab testing and experimentation, ensuring a
technological watch, as well as leading and animating a network on related
topics. Relying on this, a launch committee worked on the organisation and
the objectives of such an entity from November 2016 to July 2017, and
proposed to set up the SSP Lab unit within the DMCSI, capitalising on the
division DMAEE resources and experience. The aim of the SSP lab would not
be to concentrate all innovation within the official statistics service, but to be
an expert resource and partner catalysing innovation. It would produce in
partnership with business units innovative prototypes using new sources, new
methods, new tools, even new angles of study, upstream of production
projects. It would join innovation networks, within the official statistics service,
but also with academics and European peers. All statisticians of the official
statistics service are indeed trained at the master-level engineering Grandes
Ecoles ENSAE and ENSAI, which are specialised in statistics, computational IT
for statistics and economics, and have therefore already integrated
datascience and technologies for Big Data in their curriculums. As such, a
“branched” vision within the whole official statistics service of the datascience
innovation can be adopted. The SSP Lab programme relies mainly on the
business unit proposals, functions with reactivity (mainly through experimental
projects that assume the risk of failure) and one of the important roles of the
SSP Lab is the dissemination of a culture of innovation and knowledge,
exchange of good practices, sharing feedback.
The French Decree of 10 April 2018 modified the INSEE organisation to set
up this new unit. Closely related, the new Directorate of Information
Technologies. This Directorate will include a unit dedicated to IT innovation
called the Enterprise Architecture, Security and Innovation (EASI) that will
foster technical innovation in the computing field (for example, by setting up
distributed computing platforms and containerisation). The SSP Lab and the
EASI will work in close collaboration.

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