Big data, state data management, experimental and prompt statistics, data lakes and experimentation platforms – these are the most frequent phrases in the European meetings on statistics. Official statistics meets the third World Statistics Day on the threshold of major changes.

In the letter to the world’s statisticians, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, writes: “Current, reliable, timely and trusted data are necessary to understand the changing world in which we live. Statistics are critical for evidence-based policy making across all sectors and all societies, regardless of cultural and historical backgrounds or level of development. The unprecedented Coronavirus pandemic has elevated the importance of data and statistics, and demonstrated how linking data to geospatial information can help us to track the dynamics of a rapidly changing global situation.<…> Investing in data and statistics is the only way in which we will be able to make the decisions needed to respond and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and get on track to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.”

Dr. Jūratė Petrauskienė, Director General of Statistics Lithuania, also emphasizes the need to change the course and working methods.

“COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world. And for us, this crisis has shown how we must work from now on. Decision-makers need reliable and prompt data “here and now” and we must be ready to provide them such data,” – Dr. Jūratė Petrauskienė says.

She points out that Statistics Lithuania takes on a fundamentally new role of the state data manager.

“Isolated and fragmented data do not generate high value. Valuable information is obtained through consolidation of data from different areas, analysis of such data, perception of the general context and comparison, and at the same time, ensuring the promptness and detail of such information,” Dr. Jūratė Petrauskienė says.

The soon-to-be launched State Data Governance Information System, developed based on the multifunctional and powerful data management platform, will allow the creation of a common space for important state data. The new system will allow the receipt of the data for the state’s needs “here and now”, efficient exchange thereof, opening to the business and scientific community, analysis of data in sandboxes, expansion of publicly available information with the prompt experimental information. It will also reduce the burden to the data managers in opening the data to the public, and standardized processing of data will lead to improvement in their quality.

Similar trends prevail throughout Europe: data lakes and complex data repositories are created to allow the decision-makers to promptly receive the required data via single channel. 

“It is a completely new course of our work. It will be difficult but interesting,” – Director General of Statistics Lithuania is convinced.