Central Statistics Office
Overview
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) is Ireland's national statistical office, and their purpose is to impartially collect, analyse and make available statistics about Ireland’s people, society and economy.
Specifically, the collection, compilation, extraction and dissemination for statistical purposes of information relating to economic, social and general activities and conditions in the state. These official statistics inform decision making across a range of areas including construction, health, welfare, environment and the economy and at a European level they provide an accurate picture of Ireland’s economic and social performance and enable comparisons between Ireland and other countries.
How did we engage with the customer?
We engaged with the technical and business teams to fully understand the challenges that faced the CSO. We fully documented the business and technical requirements and mapped out a solution that could deliver on the key requirements. This solution would be based on delivering several thousand mobile end points, including routers with a centrally managed platform that could deliver a secure but streamlined end user experience for the CSO enumerators. This solution was built around a number of best in class platforms.
How did we solve their challenges?
With our understanding of the key challenges and the desired outcomes we designed a solution with the mobile devices. These devices are ruggedized and water proof and are designed to work in the harshest environments. This is a key requirement for CSO given the nature of the environments they are working in.
The customer needs and challenges
The initial requirement from the CSO was to help them with a digital transformation project to assist the 2020 Census. This would involve several thousand CSO enumerators and supervisors visiting and collecting Census information forms from each household across the country using mobile handheld devices to collect and update central information stores. This is a considerable undertaking and requires careful and precise planning and is generally undertaken by the CSO every 5 years.
“After a long, arduous and methodical procurement process we chose MacroEV as Vodafones exclusive UEM technology partner to enable us to deliver on the digital mobile requirements of the Census. MacroEV demonstrated their unrivalled expertise in this space and were the only partner that could do the end to end solution including Hardware, Software, DaaS, Managed Service, Secure 3PL logistics and 2nd life. They excelled in all areas throughout the project.”
Michael Doherty – IT ManagerWhat were the main challenges the customer was facing?
The CSO initially delivers a census form to every household in the state before census collection night, also included in this are forms to Hotels, Guesthouses, Hospitals and ships. This initial forms and certain additional information must be captured and relayed back to a central database. On Census night each household or property must record each individual present and fill out the detailed census form. The CSO want to use a mobile technology platform to record important information on a mobile devices with an always on secure connection back to their central systems. The solution would also need extended hours of support and a resilient network with nationwide coverage.
