By Ron Coates, 6 April 2004 16:00
NEWS Services outfit Xansa is to help the ONS (Office of National Statistics) revamp its IT, as part of the department's £75m modernisation programme.
An ONS spokesman said: "The ONS was formed with the amalgamation of two departments in 1996. As a result, there are a number of legacy systems that can't communicate.
"The aim of the modernisation process is to provide a commonality of platform for the Information Management System. We want to improve the quality and timeliness of our figures and gain access to the data. The new system should move to a single ONS database."
The statisticians have already decided to standardise on a standard tabulating package, SuperCross, and plan to establish a range of common statistical tools and methodology. A key requirement will be to integrate the survey sources, including the continuous household survey data.
Xansa director Steve Stratton said: "We will be assisting the staff and training them in the transformation of the programmes. Well also be responsible for the technical side - setting up the Oracle component-based database and the rollout."
The ONS already offers quite localised statistics on neighbourhoods and other small areas. It is about to conduct a major public consultation exercise as part of its Citizens Information project, which aims to get all public information on individuals onto one massive database.
The spokesman added: "This could make things much easier for people. When you move house, for instance, there are dozens of people that you have to inform - this could make it easy."
The project will be worth more than £10m to Xansa and is the latest in a string of central government contract wins that include the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Department for Work and Pensions.
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