Statistics Estonia transforming into a national data agency in the coming years

“The main task of Statistics Estonia in the coming years is to make necessary information easily and conveniently available for enterprises and state authorities. This is achieved by maximum use of the data that the state already has available,” said Toomas Tõniste, Minister of Finance. “The aim is to decrease administrative burden as a result of the reforms – enterprises and institutions will then be able to focus more on their main activity”.

“Central to the strategy of Statistics Estonia is offering personalised statistics and data sources to users. They expect answers quickly and based on real-time data, so essentially we have to build up data governance that would contribute to making better decisions based on real-time data,” said Mart Mägi, Director General of Statistics Estonia, when explaining the institution’s strategic direction of the coming years.

“The most important foundation of a smart country and data-based decisions in the next decade is data that are of quality, in the right format and on time,” remarked Mr Mägi. “We have to build the ability in the state that would allow reasonable reuse of data and that one dataset would not be collected multiple times. The data collected in this way can be used for data mining to find quick answers to critical issues in the society,” he explained. “Statistics Estonia is moving towards data mining and data service. Our longer-term aim is to answer any question about the Estonian society in 48 hours if the data are available. This major objective is divided into parts and requires serious work,” remarked Mr Mägi.