UNSD Document

4. The new structure: top level and staff services

The new organisation comprises three main levels: at the top level the executive board, at the second level four divisions and at the third level twenty departments. Appendix 1 shows the organisation chart, with staff numbers as foreseen after the reduction by 300, as imposed by the government.

Executive Board

The Executive Board consists of three people: the Director-General and directors for statistical policy and statistical processing respectively. The Board’s main tasks are strategic decision-making for the Bureau as a whole and day-to-day management. Corporate issues are dealt with in the Management Committee, i.e. the Executive Board plus the directors of the four divisions.

Four centralised staff units support the Executive Board, namely:

Policy staff

A small policy staff will support the Executive Board in the preparation of policy related issues, such as statistical programming, international relations, the secretariat of the Central Commission of Statistics and corporate communication.

Human Resource Management (HRM)

This unit develops and controls an HRM strategy in terms of career planning, management development programmes and in particular training and education. For the latter purpose an in-house School of Statistics will be set up to provide systematic statistical training facilities and programmes. All personnel staff belong functionally to the HRM unit, although in operational terms most will be assigned to Division staff units.

Planning and control

This unit is responsible for the preparation of the annual budget and all reporting requirements, both internally and externally. Its main tool is the recently introduced management information system BISNIS, in which working hours and expenditures are accounted for on a project basis. Transparency of principal-contractor relationships is crucial to the system.

Financial administration

All administrative systems of the Bureau, including financial matters, fall under the responsibility of this unit.

5. Divisions: the basics

Production versus R&D

A first distinction refers to production versus R&D. There is a separate division for the latter, which will also incorporate facilities such as domestic matters, printing and documentation in addition to information technology and statistical methodology. This division is called Technology and Facilities (TNF).

With respect to the traditional dilemma of the benefits of concentration of specialised knowledge on the one hand and the need for involvement of R&D staff in primary working processes on the other, a compromise solution has been adopted. Functionally, all IT and most methodology staff of the Bureau are assigned to TNF. In operational terms, staff involved in the development of tailor-made IT tools and in the day to day control are placed in the production divisions. For general methodological issues and general tool development, often carried out in large projects, there is a pool of methodologists and IT specialists, about half of whom are involved in the direct support of the production divisions.

Input versus throughput versus output; business statistics versus social statistics
Within the production sphere, similarity of processes is the leading criterion for distinguishing the three intended production divisions. The initial inclination was towards the well-known delineation between input, throughput and output, with the databases BASELINE and STATBASE as logical and physical demarcation points. However, further study revealed that the input and throughput processes for data on persons and for data on businesses have little in common, while on the other hand the input and throughput processes within the two populations proved much more coherent.

These findings formed the basis for the decision to set up separate divisions for Business Statistics (BES) and persons-oriented Social and Spatial Statistics (SRS). The spatial statistics were included in the latter division mainly for reasons of balance with respect to size.
As there were also stages in the process that cannot be assigned to either of these two divisions, a third production division was needed to accommodate cross-division issues, of which statistical programming, macro-integration and publication are the most obvious. Thus the division Macro- economic statistics and publication emerged.

6. The divisions and their departments

The four divisions break down into a total of twenty departments, each described briefly below. All the divisions have a Support and Development department, with high-skilled staff responsible for specific projects on statistical and automation issues and financial and administrative matters. Some of these staff are seconded from pools, which functionally belong to other units.

6.1 The Technology and Facilities Division (TNF)

The goal of this Division is to ensure the quality and effectiveness of statistical processes and products, both through innovation and by supporting the production divisions. In the light of the specific purposes and conditions of the current reorganisation, the focus is on integration of statistical methods in application tools, as well as on standardisation of these tools.

The division comprises four departments:

- Methodology and Informatics exercises the human resource management for three staff pools. The R&D pool consists of researchers and project managers, half of whom support the production divisions. All staff members from the pool for application development and management are assigned to the production divisions. Lastly, there is the trainee pool, consisting of recruits with academic or senior vocational qualificationss who are involved in a diversity of projects and thus become familiar with a variety of statistical skills.

- Information and Communication Technology is responsible for the organisation and maintenance of the technological infrastructure. There are sub-departments for front-office services, back-office and research.

- The Facilities department provides services with respect to the building, office space, printing and copying, documentation management and purchasing.

- Support and Development develops policies and implements projects with respect to corporate quality management.

6.2 The Business Statistics (BES) and Social and Spatial Statistics (SRS) Divisions
BES compiles statistical information on the activities of companies and institutions, or groups of these, as well as on business-related aspects such as technology, energy and the environment. SRS collects information on the demographics, activities and quality of life of persons and households, and on spatial issues. As their internal structure is essentially similar, the two divisions will be discussed simultaneously here.

In terms of the logical process description outlined above, the goals of these sister divisions can be phrased as follows:

1. fill STATBASE with publishable data that comply with concepts and classifications as developed in co-operation with division MSP. "Publishable" means comprehensive, reliable, consistent and non-confidential;
2. contribute to the compiling of publications, to be issued by MSP;
3. provide MSP with input for macro-integration.

Within the Divisions, the predominant distinction is that between data collection (from external sources) on the one hand and data analysis on the other, with the input database BASELINE as the demarcation point. The former demands skills that are primarily oriented towards the world of the data sources, whereas the latter is more subject-matter oriented. There is a further distinction with respect to data collection, i.e. according to type of source: existing registers versus own surveys.

These considerations result in a basic structure for each of the two divisions as illustated in Figure 2.