In April 2016 ISTAT (Italian National Statistical Institute) started a corporate restructuring process that interested all the statistical production structures and that led to a completely renewed organizational setup. Before the above mentioned reorganization, the statistical processes were organized according to the classical ‘stovepipe’ model, that involved independent, non-integrated, statistical processes including all the necessary skills: statisticians, information technology experts, thematic experts, methodologists.The new model restricts the production processes only to the thematic experts, while all the “cross” expertise isare all assigned to specialized structures. The main advantage of the new setup concerns the overall system efficiency, while the main disadvantage concerns the increased fragmentation of the production processes.
Before the restructuring process, response rates in economic structural surveys were quite low and unsatisfactory. After two years from the introduction of the new organization the medium response rate increased from 48.8 to 59.5 per cent for structural surveys and from 59.0 to 79.0 for short-term surveys. At the same time, the duration of the data collection periods for structural surveys reduced from 152 to 115 days.
Keywords
Data collection, response rates, process efficiency, official statistics, business stastistics, quality of statistics, non-response, statistical survey
