Page 14 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 1

STS339 Irene Salemink et al.
2.2 Working under Business Architecture
An important role in the design of the chain of business statistics and a
necessary condition to implement chain management has been fulfilled by the
SN Business Architecture and the adoption of working under architecture. In
the BA implemented at SN three layers are defined; Design, Chain
management (concerning activities like planning, monitoring, data quality
management) and the actual Statistics production from the start of data
collection to publishing. Instead of stovepipes for each individual statistic, the
architecture describes these statistical processes as a value added chain and
defines several “steady states” in which the statistical data have a well-defined
status. The first steady state is of course raw data, the final one the publication
data. In the Business Architecture the statistical processes are split up in
process steps that take the data from one steady state to the next one. The BA
describes statistical processes as a value added chain in which each process
step adds value by eliminating uncertainties about the data. At every step
checks for possible errors are executed as well as checks for specific possible
diversions from the metadata, which are corrected if necessary. This means
that at every step the data have attained a specific higher level of quality.
This approach also facilitates the use of data from one process in another
one; by making use of the steady states the possibilities to re-use data in other
processes is largely increased. By working under architecture there exists no
overlap between processes; the work is only done once and at the most
efficient place in the overall process.

3. SBR as Backbone in the Chain of Economic Statistics
3.1 SBR positioning and role
The place and role of the Statistical Business Register are very important to
serve and support statistical processes. The Dutch SBR is part of the economic-
statistics-system and has evolved to a business register system with
subsystems. By the obligatory use of the SBR for the chain of economic
statistics the SBR is the basic infrastructural backbone in this chain. The chain
of business economic statistics comprises several main processes and flows
between them. Besides the process Business Register, also the processes
Consistency of the largest enterprises, Direct estimates turnover (STS),
production statistics (SBS), Integration Quarterly National Accounts and
Integration of National Accounts are distinguished. Figure 1 shows the main
constituents as well as the main flows from each system towards the others.

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