[Sri Lankan online daily newspaper] Daily News
The Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) launched a project to set up a Statistical Database Management System (SDMS) with the financial and technical co-operation of the office of the Commissioner of the Statistics, Korea (KOSTAT), Director General Dr. A.J. Satharasinghe said.
Addressing the overview of KOSTAT project second year completion ceremony in Colombo on Wednesday, he said the project will modernise the system of data inputs in statistical production and deliver efficient service to end users.
The project was designed by the Korea Institute for Development Strategy(KDS) to enhance cooperation between Korea and Sri Lanka and strengthen sustainable statistical capacity for governmental officials of DCS and establish IT infrastructure in Sri Lanka for an advanced national statistical system.
The project duration is three years. The KDS takes in charge of management and implementation of its 2nd year from April to November 2015 and 3rd year in 2016.
The project scope covers system development, expert dispatch, provision of equipment and training.
The system development includes development of SDMS, statistical portal service system, meta-data system and integrated data base.
It also includes human resources development and IT infrastructure development in data collection, processing and dissemination.
The Director General said the US$ 2.1 million project will be completed by the end of 2016.
KOSTAT will support the DCS to set up mid and long-term development plans, develop strategies to strengthen human resources and training in Sri Lanka.
The project includes training in Korea for high level and working level officials and instructors. The project will set up a training centre at the DCS, he said. "The DCS plays an important role in the dissemination of data among users. We need to set up an efficient and user-friendly system. We don't have a database. We store data in different forms.
We use a manual data collection process. It is costly and inefficient because it involves several steps such as collection and
transportation of documents and data entry process,"he said.
"In the last census, we used scanning for data entry. We hope to introduce a computer-based data collection system under the project to eliminate paper work and improve efficiency in data processing," Satharasinghe said.
A statistical database management and service system helps enter data easily and provides users the access to official statistics in more productive and efficient way while strengthening the capacity of the statistics staff.