Reengineering the Census Bureau's Annual Economic Surveys (2018) / Chapter Skim
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8 Toward an Integrated Annual Business Survey System
8 Toward an Integrated Annual Business Survey System
Pages 149-178
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From page 149... ...
; constructing and updating the sampling frame, which for the annual economic surveys is the Census Bureau's Business Register (Chapter 3) ; determining the concepts to be measured, data sources, including administrative records to draw on in addition to survey responses, data collection modes, and questionnaire design and content (Chapter 4)
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From page 150... ...
, the chapter identifies opportunities for near-term improvements for the Census Bureau to pursue as steps toward an ABSS. The chapter also describes the experiences of other statistical agencies that have carried out significant reinventions of major business survey programs, noting the feasibility of such reengineering, the factors that were critical for success, and the pitfalls to be avoided.
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From page 151... ...
providing for the possibility, in the future, of broader sharing of infor mation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which would permit both agencies to improve their business registers, and of using information from other government, private, and commercial sources to update and enrich the register. RECOMMENDATION 3-2: As part of the Census Bureau's planned redesign of its Business Register, it should make provision to record information each time a statistical business unit is sampled and responds in one of the annual economic surveys.
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Chapter 4: Harmonization of Questionnaires and Data Collection Processes RECOMMENDATION 4-1: The Census Bureau should carry out a comprehensive evaluation of the potential for using administrative data sources as a supplement to or an alternative for collecting survey responses for its various annual economic surveys. The Bureau should move toward a mixed-data sources approach for an Annual Business Survey System to reduce respondent burden and, potentially, to reduce costs and improve data quality.
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From page 153... ...
To facilitate response, businesses should be able to readily obtain a print version of every questionnaire. RECOMMENDATION 4-6: In harmonizing questionnaires across the current annual economic surveys, leading to an integrated Annual Business Survey System, the Census Bureau should develop a template providing standardized question, ques tion block, and questionnaire elements to be used wherever possible.
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RECOMMENDATION 5-9: The Census Bureau should study the feasibility of pro ducing reliable preliminary estimates of key statistics from the annual economic surveys and, ultimately, from an Annual Business Survey System. RECOMMENDATION 5-10: The Census Bureau should conduct research on what alternative economic data are available and whether there are nonsurvey data sources that can be used to produce more timely estimates, more accurate esti mates, or both or otherwise supplement the annual economic surveys and, ulti mately, an Annual Business Survey System.
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RECOMMENDATION 6-2: The Census Bureau should harmonize the use of a dministrative data from the Bureau's Business Register and other sources across the annual economic surveys for the purposes of imputing values for missing r esponses and cross-checking the reliability of reported data. RECOMMENDATION 6-3: The Census Bureau should systematically evaluate all item imputation models used for missing data in the annual economic surveys to determine whether improvements can be made in either the form of the model or the covariates used for prediction.
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Chapter 7: Dissemination RECOMMENDATION 7-1: The Census Bureau should design access and re trieval mechanisms for data from the annual economic surveys and an Annual Business Survey System, once developed, to be as straightforward as possible; users should not be forced to use complex tools to do simple things. Expert and experienced users should find it easy and efficient to download data and produce their own analyses.
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From page 157... ...
RECOMMENDATION 7-9: The Census Bureau should have explicit detailed procedures for archiving data and documentation from the annual economic sur veys and an Annual Business Survey System, once it is developed. The Census Bureau should also follow best practices, such as permanent url addresses, for datasets and documentation to facilitate the ability of users to access valuable historical information from the annual economic surveys.
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To support an enhanced Business Register, it will be important for the Census Bureau to implement appropriate changes in the COS and the SQ-CLASS. The panel's recommended ABSS would have a single application programming interface to access data, which would allow for improved dissemination.
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Ongoing quality review needs to encompass potential new data sources, the processes used for data collection and estimation, and the estimates and data products provided to users. RECOMMENDATION 8-1: To improve the utility of annual busi ness data, reduce response burden on businesses, and more effec tively use scarce resources, the Census Bureau should develop a detailed concept and implementation plan for an Annual Business Survey System (ABSS)
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Quality evaluation and improvement should encompass current and poten tial new data sources, data collection and processing, and resulting estimates. The Census Bureau has commendably begun work to reengineer the annual economic surveys, acknowledging the need to integrate the separate surveys, streamline and harmonize the data collection, and make the resulting data more timely, accurate, and relevant to users.
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or similar tracking system can be applied for planning the activities to be carried out and the resources required. 8.3 INITIAL STEPS IN HARMONIZING THE ANNUAL ECONOMIC SURVEYS Throughout this report, the panel recommends a number of ways for the Census Bureau to improve the current annual economic surveys, includ ng ways to harmonize them, using "tailoring within harmonization" i to address significant industry differences, and ways to improve data col
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. NOTES: API, application programming interface; BR, Business Register; IT, informaion technology; R&D, research and development; SRS, simple random t sampling.
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The Census Bureau will need to develop a detailed project plan, as suggested in Figure 8-1, with projects staged over the implementation period by their importance for an ABSS, by the necessity to include them as first steps because they are on the critical path for ultimate success, and by the ability of the annual economic surveys staff to leverage the capabilities of staff in other parts of the Census Bureau. Such leveraging will be critical to enable current production responsibilities to be met while getting research and development under way for an ABSS.
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8.3.1 Business Register Key to many needed improvements in the annual economic surveys and to the development of an ABSS is the timely completion of the Census Bureau's planned redesign of the Business Register. The redesign should include the panel's recommended enhancements (see Recommendation 3-1)
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and redesigning processing systems to combine survey responses with administrative information. 8.3.3 Sampling and Estimation In the panel's view, there are several changes that could improve the sample designs of the current suite of annual economic surveys in the short run and facilitate the development of an ABSS in the longer run.
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. 8.3.5 Dissemination The panel stresses that it is never too soon to begin working with users, while taking into account their differing data needs and expertise, on improved data access for the current annual economic surveys, which can be enhanced for an ABSS.
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3 Based on presentation by Daniela Ravindra, Statistics Canada, "Statistics Canada's Inte grated Business Statistics Project," during the panel's October 29, 2015, meeting. 4 Communication from Jeroen van Velzen and Wim Vosselman of Statistics Netherlands, July 21, 2016.
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From page 168... ...
The primary goal of the IBSP program has been to achieve efficiency improvements for all of Statistics Canada's business surveys, and the initiative has in fact reduced staffing requirements and streamlined data collection and processing. Its scope was far broader than the scope of the panel's recommended ABSS for the Census Bureau, but many of the considerations affecting the design of the IBSP initiative also are applicable to thinking about the implementation of an ABSS (see Section 8.5 below, "Lessons Learned for Implementing an ABSS")
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From page 169... ...
The schedule allowed no time for pretesting of the new questionnaire or the new production system, which meant that some issues needed to be worked out after the system was in place, and it was a few years before everything was working smoothly. Because Statistics Netherlands already had a centralized business register, there was no need to have a project for centralization of the register.
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Methods and Advice Process Control Organization FIGURE 8-2 Timeline of the IMPECT1 projects at Statistics Netherlands, 1999–2002. NOTES: IMPECT: IMPlementation EConomic Transformation; IMPECT1 projects covered 12 annual business surveys.
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8.5 LESSONS LEARNED FOR IMPLEMENTING AN ABSS The major initiatives to redesign the business surveys of Statistics C anada, Statistics Netherlands, and other statistical agencies all identified the same major factors that must exist to accomplish a successful redesign (see Box 8-2)
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From page 172... ...
In a comparable way, IMPECT1 at Statistics Netherlands was divided into several component projects, and plans for each of those projects were elaborated by the team responsible for that part of the work. As outlined by senior Census Bureau officials to the panel, the impetuses for changes to the Census Bureau's economic statistics programs include budget pressures; increasing difficulty in obtaining responses to business surveys; growing desire from data users for more detailed data; and the per
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Communication is required not only v at the start of the process, but throughout all phases of the project. At Statistics Netherlands, there was a strong organizational imperative for starting the IMPECT project, but continuing communication was essential to ensure that it succeeded.
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A similar level of commitment will be required at the Census Bureau to ensure the success of the reengineering of the annual economic surveys that the panel recommends. It will be critical that the director, as well as other senior managers, endorse and fully commit to the project.
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From page 175... ...
The second reason was the longer than expected time and effort to bring the newly integrated programs into a regular production cycle with the expected level of quality and timeliness.11 A second lesson learned was that complexity in the plan cannot always be justified. This is something that Statistics Netherlands worried about a great deal in connection with IMPECT; hence, the project mantra, "Keep it simple." Ravindra concludes that, in the IBSP project, too much effort 10 Based on presentation by Daniela Ravindra, Statistics Canada, "Statistics Canada's Inte grated Business Statistics Project," during the panel's October 29, 2015, meeting.
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SOURCES: Adapted from presentation by Daniela Ravindra, Statistics Canada, "Statistics Canada's Integrated Business Statistics Project," during the panel's October 29, 2015, meet ing, and Ravindra (2016)
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13 Based on presentation by Daniela Ravindra, Statistics Canada, "Statistics Canada's Inte grated Business Statistics Project," during the panel's October 29, 2015, meeting.
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. Designing and Conducting Business Surveys.
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