WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE QUALITY ASSESSMENTS ARE COMPLETE?
At a broad level the ABS anticipates that the ESA for Australia initiative will facilitate more collaborative initiatives across governments, at both the Australian Government and state and territory levels, to help strengthen our national statistical system.
The quality assessments have been made as a snapshot for the purposes of ESA as part of a national, statistical initiative. Quality is a fitness for purpose concept and quality standards and needs vary depending on the purpose for which the data is being used. Accordingly, the quality assessment does not necessitate any action from data custodians. It is intended as a tool for data custodians, should they decide, to help guide investment. Data custodians retain responsibility and ownership for their dataset(s) and any decisions around the need for improvement or investment. Where the ESA quality assessment process has identified specific quality gaps for an essential statistical asset, the ABS, through its statistical leadership role in advancing the NSS, will work collaboratively with relevant stakeholders including data custodians to determine appropriate ways to address them.
Resource permitting, the ABS is planning to support other users and data custodians to undertake their own quality assessments for statistics not contained on the list of ESA for Australia, including non-official statistics. This will support other tools currently available including the Data Quality Online Tool, on the NSS website, which is designed to assist users in generating data quality statements.
The focus of the ESA for Australia initiative has always been to inform discussion and debate on how to most effectively and efficiently prioritise investments in the official statistical system. Nevertheless, there has been increasing interest in improving accessibility to the nation’s most important statistics through a single repository. The ABS is investigating options to make the ESA datasets available in one centralised place for users to access, with permission from data custodians.
Now the quality assessment phase has been completed, in addition to the information being used for the purposes of the ESA for Australia initiative, there may also be merit in seeking to publicly recognise statistics that meet the quality standards to a certain level. Some countries have an accreditation process, such as the National Statistics Accreditation currently employed in the UK. This has not been the focus of the ESA quality assessment phase but will be discussed with stakeholders as a potential future direction to gauge the level of support in future iterations of the ESA for Australia initiative.
Print Page
Print All