DIME/ITDG Plenary February 2017/13/EN

DIRECTORS OF METHODOLOGY/IT DIRECTORS

PLENARY MEETING

14/15 FEBRUARY 2017

Item 13 of the agenda

ESS Standardisation Process

  1. Input sought from the DIME/ITDG

The DIME/ITDG is invited to:

  • Take note of the work done so far by the Expert Group on Standardisation;
  • Provide guidance on the types of normative documents to be considered in priority as candidate ESS Standards by the Expert Group on Standardisation;
  • Discuss the added value and provide recommendations how to foster the use of ESS standards in practice, including on strengthening their links with ESS Vision 2020.
  1. Background and brief history

The principles of standardisation and interoperability are at the core of ESS cooperation and the ESS Vision 2020 as they enable improvements of efficiency through collaboration within the ESS, while fully respecting the subsidiarity principle.

Since 2010 a series of projects related to the standardisation of the ESS have been running, culminating in September 2015 with the adoption by the ESSC of a process, governance and a roadmap for implementing a transparent procedure to endorse new and existing ESS standards in a harmonised way. After a pilot phase of 2 years the process will need to be evaluated and fine-tuned. The process covers the complete lifecycle of ESS standards and includes a sort of validation procedure for officially recognizing non-legislative normative documents as ESS standards.

The implementation of the ESS process of standardisation is taken care of by the Expert Group on Standardisation which was specifically set-up for the purpose as a sub-group of the Working Group on Standards. Following the decision of the ESSC, the implementation of the process started with the so-called fast-track cases which cover those specifications that can be considered as already having all the characteristics of an ESS standards, without however having already been granted this status by the ESSC. In this first step a first series of supposedly non-controversial normative documents were submitted to the ESSC at its meeting on 9 February 2017. Once approved, they will enter the catalogue of ESS standards.

The process of ESS standardisation covers way more than just ratifying existing specifications. It is intended to cover the complete lifecycle of ESS standards. The second year of the pilot phase will start addressing the implementation of the rest of the process. This means that solutions need to be found for the remaining 4 of the 5 stages of the process of ESS standardisation, namely: Establish the need, Develop, Disseminate and support implementation, Maintain and review (all except Adopt which occurs between Develop and Disseminate in the process).

At the end of the piloting phase in 2017 an assessment of the process of ESS standardisation will need to be prepared and ultimately submitted to the ESSC. In view of starting the second part of the pilot phase and to prepare this assessment, some topics already seem to deserve more elaboration:

  • What is exactly the implication for ESS members of granting the status of ESS standard to normative documents and what is the expected use of ESS standards in the day-to-day work? While such use may differ from standard to standard, can we derive some general guidance?
  • What is in practice the trigger to develop or to update standards in relevant areas and how can the ESS Standardisation process be operated in a forward-looking way (i.e. in support of modernisation and innovation)?
  • How to reinforce the link between ESS Standardisation and ESS developments, in particular in the context of the ESS Vision 2020?

Below these topics are elaborated further.

  1. Added value of ESS Standards

Although a clear definition of the concept of ESS standard accompanies the process of ESS standardisation it appears that precise implications and concrete expected uses of these standards can still be clarified at an operational level. The following paragraphs attempt to put the concept of ESS standard in the practical context of the ESS and provide a broad picture of the added value of defining such instruments. This is expected to facilitate the operation of the process of ESS standardisation by clarifying the responsibility of the Expert Group on Standardisation and involved governance bodies. Current strategic visions for the official statistics in the ESS and the UN call for improvements in productivity and flexibility and this this is expected to be enabled by the so-called standards-based modernisation of official statistics. The approach of national and international standards bodies which are operating for a long time could be transposed to a large extent to the particular context of the ESS. The ESS process of standardisation defines formally the notion of ESS standard as follows:

An ESS Standard is a normative document, established by consensus among ESS members and approved by a recognised body according to the procedure of ESS standardisation, that provides for common and repeated use by several actors in the ESS, rules, guidelines or characteristics for the development, production and dissemination of European Statistics, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in the context of the implementation of the mission and vision of the ESS.

An ESS Standard is a type of normative document. Normative documents consist of the broad category of documents that provides rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results. In the ESS context three types of normative documents exist: legal acts, standards, other normative documents. In this context a “document” means any medium with information recorded on or (not necessarily in the form of document) in it e.g. guidelines, methodologies, algorithms, IT specifications, software, services, models, templates, codes lists, legal acts, vocabularies, checklists etc. The category of "other normative documents" covers basically all normative documents that are not legal acts or standards (including candidate standards). Some examples of this category could be UML, BPMN, CSPA, Firefox, the formula of the GINI coefficient or other inequality indexes, or data structures and code lists which are not enforced by legal acts. A legal act is a normative document providing binding legislative rules that is adopted by an authority. At the contrary of legal acts standards are intended to be used on a voluntary basis yet having a stronger status than other normative documents not included in the family of official ESS standards. ESS standards are per definition aimed at providing re-usable solution patterns and reducing the diversity in the way the missions of the ESS are realised

The crucial difference between ESS standards and other normative documents is that standards are expected to be established in the respects of ESS standardisation principles and be managed throughout their lifecycle under the ESS standardisation process. This offers several guarantees to users of ESS standards and other stakeholders of ESS standardisation. Indeed, standards resulting from the standardisation processes are built around the following 5 principles:

  • Consensus: Acceptance by consensus ensures that all views are heard and the resulting standard is generally agreed to. Consensus means a general agreement, characterised by the absence of sustained opposition to substantial issues by any important part of the concerned interests and by a process that involves seeking to take into account the views of all parties concerned and to reconcile any conflicting arguments. Consensus does not imply unanimity.
  • Transparency and openness: Involvement of all stakeholders ensures transparency of the process provides advance public notice of a proposed standard and helps to promote usage of the forthcoming standard.
  • Balance: Balance means that no one group’s interest dominates the approach. This implies that special attention should be paid to applicability in countries/institutions of different sizes and different levels of development and that different local context can be dealt with.
  • Due process: It ensures that anyone with a "direct and material interest" has a right to express a position and to have that position considered (where necessary including the right to appeal). If a position is not adopted the reason should be well explained.
  • Proportionality: It means that the ESS standardisation processes must be lean. It should be applied in such a way that the cost of application is reasonable compared to the possible standardisation results that are envisaged. All standardisation activities are pertinent, but the effort put into any activity has to be proportional to the expected benefits.

The process covers the full lifecycle of ESS standards and develops them based on explicit needs. It includes promotion and support to implementation and recommends a periodical review possibly triggering a maintenance activity. A feedback loop allows feedback received from implementation to be taken into account when ESS standards are maintained. And last but not least, the ESS process of standardisation assures that ESS governance bodies formally approve ESS standards (thematic working group and ESSC) which provide a certain degree of assurance on the quality and stability that can be expected from these specifications which is a point that can reassure investors when basing developments on them.

Standards are a means to capture knowledge and promote best practices, allowing interested parties to re-use solutions without having to support a full investment. Standards allow sharing approaches to European statistics in less cumbersome and constraining way than through legal acts and allows comparatively for a faster reaction to emerging needs. Standards also constitute a key element in support to interoperability as they support compatibility of processes, facilitate communication and allow for sharing of services and infrastructures to support collaboration. In this respect ESS Standardisation is a key component of the ESS Enterprise Architecture being setup to guide the implementation of the ESS Vision 2020.

More broadly standards allow for collaboration and increase opportunities in areas of sharing and re-use of solutions and collaborative developments. This is nowadays an important element in public sector in general and official statistics particular, promoted notably in the Common statistical Production Architecture (CSPA). On the other hand a more generalized use of standards has also the ability to stimulate competition among service providers and to reduce dependency and vendor lock-in associated to particular solutions and technologies.

The role of standardisation in knowledge management, interoperability and collaboration, etc. makes it an important support to leadership in innovation. In this view the ISO itself explains that standardisation is a strategic business issue with a direct impact on new product development and that leadership in standards also means leadership in technology. The same article also states that standards are never neutral because they reflect the strengths and innovations of those who develop them, and that means that non-participation in standardisation hands decision making over to the competition.

Finally, one of the major added value of international standards is that they increase quality, trust and transparency. In the context of the ESS this is well highlighted in the European Statistics Code of Practice where the recommendation is to base products and process on established standards. It is easy to understand that statistics based on standard concepts and classifications, methods, implementations, etc. will usually be assessed as of higher quality as products based on local notions and conventions. In the same way products produced by processes based on standard methodologies and software will be in principle easier to trust than others based on more local and opaque approaches. Probably all dimensions of quality can be concerned by standardisation but a very obvious one is comparability of statistics which can only benefit from harmonizing output and process design and sharing implementation solutions.

  1. Expected use of ESS Standards in practice

Standards are to be used on a voluntary basis, nevertheless as they provide ready-to-use solution patterns, developing a local solution in an area covered by ESS standards should in principle call for a justification. Also ESS standards per definition represent in a self-commitment of the ESS to agreed norms so a certain level of support to these norms would be expected. On the other hand documented deviations to standards can provide a key input to standards maintenance and establishment of needs for new standards as foreseen in the ESS standardisation process. This requires a way to capture this sort of information and feed it into the ESS standardisation process. The following cases are identified having the highest potential benefit from standardisation. In order to further implement the process of ESS standardisation and fully receive the benefits, ways of systematically connecting the following scenarios with ESS standardisation should be found.

  • Use of standards in designing and building statistical processes: Standards provide solution patterns that can translate into re-usable designs and implementations which may have a positive impact on efficiency, quality, trust, etc. Design and build phases of the statistical business process would be expected to evaluate existing standards before considering own developments concerning for instance output and process design or software solutions for data collection, processing and dissemination.
  • Use of standards to support interoperability and cooperation: Whenever interoperability and more generally collaboration are at stake ESS standards should be considered. As per the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) interoperability can be considered at various levels. Legal interoperability consists of ensuring that legislation governing operations of partners is not incompatible making collaboration complex or impossible. All other interoperability layers (namely organisational, semantic and technical interoperability) can be supported by standardisation without requiring a legal enforcement. In a very broad sense cooperation between statistical organisations in the ESS and beyond is facilitated by the use of proper standards. This can include for example joint development projects, sharing services, benchmarking, knowledge exchange and staff mobility. To summarise activities involving collaboration should more than others consider standards when describing projects or design and building solutions.
  • Use of standards when formulating requirements in ESS projects, grants or calls for tenders: A specific case where the numerous advantages of using standards may deliver most value is the technical specification of actions to be realised through grant agreements or sub-contracting. ESS standards provide common language, encapsulate best practices and result in clear benchmarks against which work can be assessed. It is likely that some cross-cutting standards apply to all areas while others are applicable depending to the particular topic of concerned contracts or grants. Here too, deviation from standards would seem to require a justification and systematically channelling this information back to the process of standardisation and to the maintainers of standards will improve fitness-for-use of ESS standards through maintenance or development of missing specifications.
  • When innovation is a target, development of standards should be considered: Innovative approaches once captured in ESS standards can be used as a basis for collaboration and partnerships and support the move from laboratory or piloting stages to larger-scale deployment in production. As explained earlier in the document leadership in standards often means leadership in technology.
  1. Next steps

The following next steps are considered:

  • Promote ESS standardisation: Standards are sometimes defined per opposition to legal acts as having a lower level of "enforcabilility". This is a very limited view of standardisation that disregards the many other dimensions covered by standards such as quality, innovation and transparency. Inspiration on communication on the value of standardisation can be found looking at non-ESS standardisation initiatives like the Join Initiative on Standardisation or the World Standards Cooperation.
  • Develop an action plan for each step of the ESS standardisation process: Initial steps were taken mainly to setup the Expert Group on Standardisation and to perform a fast-track adoption of some normative documents previously identified as quasi-standards. To continue the implementation of the process of ESS standardisation actions need to be defined for covering for the following steps of the process (see annexe for a more detailed view of these steps): Establishment of needs, Development, Adoption, Dissemination, support, implementation, Maintenance and review.
  • Introduce a notion of quality of the portfolio of ESS standards: Criteria can be identified for evaluating the quality of standards. This could help activities of review and establishment of needs. The quality of the portfolio could in turn be assessed, but could probably not consist simply of an aggregation as this would for example not take into account issues in terms of coverage of the portfolio. Some elements from previous work on assessing the impact of standards could perhaps be useful here.
  • Structure and systematise the involvement of stakeholders: An exhaustive identification of stakeholders and the setup of explicit communication channels will support the process. Stakeholders include naturally users of standards and actors in the process of standardisation, but there are most likely other stakeholders that are impacted by ESS standardisation. In particular the goal will be to involve systematically ESS governance bodies (e.g. working groups) in a leading role for identifying and promoting standards in statistical domains.

ANNEXE: Overview of the ESS standardisation process

ESS standard: A normative document, established by consensus among ESS members and approved by a recognised body according to the procedure of ESS standardisation, that provides for common and repeated use by several actors in the ESS, rules, guidelines or characteristics for the development, production and dissemination of European Statistics, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in the context of the implementation of the mission and vision of the ESS.

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