InterGovWorld's Spotlight series profiles executives, decision-makers and their initiatives across all levels of Canadian government.
Part 2 of Spotlight on Anil Arora, director general of the Census program branch.
In Part 2 of InterGovWorld's Spotlight on Anil Arora of Statistics Canada, he chats about the overwhelming number of Canadians who opted to go online to submit their Census 2006 forms. Arora and his team had to embrace partnership agreements, streamline resources and review their enterprise architecture and processes in order to match the great citizen expectation.
Q) How many citizens chose to submit their census results online as opposed to the traditional methods offered?
A) This is the first census in the world that provided multiple channels with an integrated back-end for people to respond, so it didn't matter that you gave us your response on the phone, on paper or online.
We're very proud of the fact that Canadians have the choice. This is one of those areas where, given the amount of traffic and business that Canadians generate on the Internet, and the comfort level they have with conducting business online, this was an expectation.
As a program, this really measured changes in society. It also reflects back to Canadians what we look like today. We have to work and respond to the expectations of a changing population.
We knew there was a strong expectation for an online option for the census. In this day and age, people just take it for granted. In fact, we saw shades of that back in the 2001 Census when we offered it to a couple of areas in the country, so we're very pleased with the result.
Out of about 13 million in the country, 2.26 million households filled out their census questionnaire online, and that is about 18.5 per cent of the overall response. That is an incredible response, even slightly above the targets that we had set for ourselves.
In fact, when you compare that to Australia and New Zealand (not to in any way put down the success that they had, as these are first-time ventures for most countries), Australia received nine per cent and New Zealand eight per cent. Canadians in this sense rose to the challenge and proved that this is the way forward, and I think that holds tremendous prospects for us for the future.
We were very pleased that we were responding to an expectation. We were able to work effectively with all the players online in soliciting their support, including all levels of government and related organizations, in getting the message out that that this option was available. We also worked with the private sector, not just with our contractors, but also folks at Secure Channel, and our colleagues in Public Works.
Q) Could you speak to the efforts of your department with respect to streamlining your architecture and resources, and the successes of the census infrastructure with respect to enterprise architecture?
A) Being that we deal with numbers, that's a core part of our business. When you deal with crunching the volume of numbers that we get, a very strong informatics presence within the agency is really important.
Over the past four or five years, we've always had a culture of making sure that infrastructure is secure, that it remains robust, and that it's isolated from any external tampering. Because of the nature of software and how quickly it evolves, we've taken it upon ourselves to ensure that we get the maximum out of our investment.
We've also established an architecture review board, with a mandate to review new initiatives; evaluate some of the software as its coming close to the end of its shelf life; examine migration that is happening overall, from mainframes to other server-based systems; and looking at new procurements in terms of hardware, software, business practices and processes.
The census experience, specifically, with the integration, project management, and even some of the software and hardware that we used in conducting the 2006 Census, will be integrated within our overall informatics strategy. We will be looking to that as an enterprise strategy, and I think we'll be better off moving forward, not just for the next census but also for other programs within the bureau.
Read Part 1 of InterGovWorld's Spotlight on Anil Arora, Statistics Canada
Related content:
Ten tips for effective partnerships
Modern architectures show designs on citizens
Visit the Statistics Canada Census page.
Visit the official Statistics Canada web site.
Access Spotlight Central, an archive of all past InterGovWorld spotlights.
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