Invited Paper Session at the World Statistics Congress 2023
The concept of Data Stewardship is quite common within large corporations to ensure a high degree of data quality. In short, a data steward is a person (or group of people) who is responsible for the quality of a defined part of the organization’s data space. Nowadays, the public administrations of many countries are striving to embrace this concept too. Since NSOs typically have a deep understanding of their country’s data landscape, they are usually best suited for the role of a National Data Steward. The FSO is probably not the only NSO to promote Data Stewardship – but is certainly among those with the broadest and most consequent approach, and it has a very strong institutional backing: At its meeting of 27 September 2019, the Swiss Federal Council launched a programme called “National Data Management (NaDB)”. Besides serving as the basis for the implementation of the “Once-Only-Principle” in Switzerland, NaDB also anchors the concept of Data Stewardship throughout the entire public administration!
The FSO’s Data Steward model covers the statistical and the administrative sphere of the Swiss data landscape. Because of the administration’s structure – which is distributed over three governmental levels – it was necessary to develop a process for an efficient collaboration between all parties involved. Therefore, Data Stewards reside not only on all institutional levels and within different topics (e.g., geography), they are also coordinated and directed by a federal entity: the Swiss Data Steward, represented by the head of FSO.
Although there is still some work ahead, the participants can learn from FSO’s experiences and therefore prepare for the challenges they might face when implementing an ambitious Data Steward approach in their countries.
Chair: Manuela Lenk, Vice Director and Head of the Interoperability and Registers Division of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office
Panellists:
- Georges- Simon Ulrich, Director General of the Federal Statistical Office of Switzerland
- Urmet Lee, Director General of Statistics Estonia
- Tiina Luige, Officer-in-Charge of the Statistical Division, UNECE
- Tom Dofour, Director General for Statistics Canada’s Strategic Data Management Branch