Abstract

This session is addressed to those who shape the direction and culture of organisations producing, disseminating and working with official statistics - chief statisticians, strategists and managers alike.

Based on the analyses and recommendations made in the presentations, the session will culminate with the demonstration of a toolkit (published in the Valuing of Official Statistics Report, endorsed at the CES in June, 2022) designed to facilitate the transition from largely production-based approaches, such as NSI metrics around quality, towards customer-centred measures of the value of official statistics. The world is awash with data and NSIs are under increasing pressure to produce evidence of the impact of official statistics while the market for data and statistics widens, and the gap in the quality of statistics narrows. In their efforts to demonstrate the value of official statistics, the question that NSIs may benefit from asking is whose perception of value is important here and what exactly is being measured? The presenters propose a shift in the direction of how NSIs understand and measure their success. Instead of just gathering individual metrics that strive to quantify how NSI outputs are distinctive and important, NSIs should focus on how they understand what users value, and how they are consistently delivering that value. NSIs are encouraged not to lose sight of their users and nonusers in their position as customers in the larger market of data and statistics. To consistently win their preference, this session brings a suggestion to NSIs to reorient their focus from just tracking production performance, to fine-tuning their understanding of what customers need. Some NSIs may have relied on user-satisfaction surveys for this purpose; however, these do not provide an all-encompassing customer perception of value: they are limited to reflections of experiences after engaging with a product (Sweeney and Soutar, 2001). Our proposal consists of a collaborative session between: - The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), from the United Kingdom, who will discuss their vision for statistics serving the public good, and - Members of the Conference of European Statisticians Task Force to Test and Develop the Framework for Measuring the Value of Official Statistics (whose work was endorsed by the CES in June 2022) from Hungary, New Zealand and the UK. The session will provide, among others: - Insight into what it means for statistics to serve the public good, based on research with members of the general public - A conceptual analysis of value in relation to objective and subjective measures of the properties of official statistics. - Recommendations for NSIs to reassess the value they provide customers through their products and services, and on a wider scale, the extent to which their strategies are NSI- or customer-based. - A toolkit to facilitate NSIs transitioning from production- to customer-centric strategies