To help slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the staff of national statistical organizations around the world are being required to work from home, creating challenges in managing workflow solutions and, in many cases, accessing tools and support from external partners.
This article is also available in
Russian.
Many
organizations around the world are finding themselves in a position of having to
decide how to move forward on planned conferences and meetings in the face of
the current COVID-19 pandemic. This is the position that colleagues from the
United Nations University Institute in Macau found
themselves in with the
11th International Development Informatics Association conference (IDIA2020)
planned for 25–27 March 2020. The organizing committee considered various
options, including cancellation, postponement, or relocation (which was an
option at the time), and ultimately decided on the virtual conference format.
This article is also available in
Russian.
With a substantial number of
statisticians not being able to travel and working from home, e-learning is
probably the best tool for continued learning and acquiring new skills. Many
international agencies, regional training institutes and national statistical
offices are providing e-learning courses and other learning materials. This can
be difficult to navigate, however, not knowing who provides what. An online
gateway was therefore recently launched which is meant to help in navigating
available courses: https://www.unsdglearn.org/statistics/. Different agencies
are there providing key information of their courses and a link to their own
pages where one can register for the course in question.
This article is also available in
Russian.
oday,
cloud computing stands out as a key element of an operatinal continuity and
disaster recovery plan for statistical organizations, particularly in the face
of the disruption national and global statistical systems caused by the COVID-19
crisis. Due to its reliance on hardware-independent virtualization technology,
cloud computing enables organizations to quickly back up data, applications, and
even operating systems to a remote data center, and to deploy them to multiple
users distributed in many different locations.
This article is also available in
Russian.
To limit
the COVID-19 epidemic, governments in many countries are requiring all or most
of their workforce to stay home. For national and international statistical
organizations, this raises the prospect of a protracted period of time during
which the vast majority of their operations will have to rely on telecommuting
arrangements with their staff. This in turn creates huge challenges in order to
manage “a very large and sudden spike” in the number of staff needing to work
remotely, even for organizations that already have experience supporting a
limited number of telecommuters.