STATIN improves productivity after switch to electronic system
Published:Friday | May 9, 2014 | 12:00 AM
Daraine Luton, Senior Staff Reporter
IT HAS been just over one year since the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) has replaced paper in one of its major business process with an electronic solution, and the state-owned data collection and processing agency is boasting of increased efficiencies and improved productivity owing to the switch.
Howard Hamilton, director of information technology at STATIN, told The Gleaner that, unlike in the paper era where it would take up to a month in some cases to input data collected in the field, the e-platform now sees data being made available to statisticians for analysis within 24 hours.
"We note that productivity has improved, but we have not yet quantified it," Hamilton said, while noting that some staff members who were hired to do data entry have been re-deployed because there is no longer a need for their services in that area.
"We are now able to reason and reutilise our staff because the job may have changed for this particular process, but it does not mean there are not areas within the institute that we can actually use the staff, and this project has not seen anybody being displaced in any way," Hamilton said.
But it is not only in the area of personnel deployment and faster turnaround time for the upload of data that STATIN said the new project is yielding results.
GOOD FOR GREEN
He said the environment is being made cleaner because of less reliance on paper, and associated project costs have gone down.
"Based on what the finance people have reported, there has been significant reduction in the use of paper," Hamilton said, while noting that paper is no longer used in collecting data for the Consumer Price Index, the Labour Force Survey as well as the Survey of Living Conditions.
Eduardo Nunez, senior executive from Microsoft Jamaica, the company on which platform STATIN's e-system is built, told The Gleaner that the method by which the data is stored is highly reliable and secured.
Nunez said, for example, that STATIN's data are stored on a sequel server, a similar platform which is used by the NASDAQ Stock Market, which is a global electronic marketplace for buying and selling securities as well as the benchmark index for US technology stocks.
Nunez said not only does movement to e-solutons help to improve productivity, but it also helps the Government to provide more information in a transparent way to the citizen.
The Microsoft representative told The Gleaner that Jamaican businesses and organisations are being encouraged to leverage the cloud technology, which would reduce the risk of data lost.