-- Upcoming Challenges Facing the Business Register
 

Francois Maranda

Assistant Chief Statistician

Statistics Canada

The current infrastructure of the Business Register was developed and put in place in the mid-1980s. Both the outside world and the internal environment have changed enormously in the last two decades. For example, the business world is burgeoning and rapidly changing. In a context of globalization, an increasing number of businesses are changing both their operational and their legal structure in order to reduce their operating expenses and maximize their profits. This leads to the formation of complex, multinational corporate families that pose a challenge for measuring national economic activity. These major changes in the business world are causing us to rethink the conceptual framework of the BR, notably as regards the definition of statistical entities¡ªenterprise, company, establishment and location¡ªas well as the necessary links between legal, operational and statistical entities. 

The Business Register¡¯s operating procedures have been changed several times over the years in response to specific events. These include the implementation of the unique Business Number and the integration of various sources of fiscal data into Register maintenance activities.  The Business Register¡¯s computer system is based on a complex architecture that relies heavily on IBM mainframe technology and on obsolete software that are no longer used by the other divisions of Statistics Canada.  Thus the technological environment is highly vulnerable. The modernization efforts of recent years, intended to make the Register more efficient, accessible and useful have address some issues but these changes have been made on an ad hoc basis. As a result, the different modules of the Register do not form as consistent and efficient a whole as they would if they had been developed within the framework of an architecturally integrated strategic plan.

Consequently, it appears that the changes made over the years to the Business Register are not enough to respond adequately in the medium and long term to emerging pressures. In light of the above-mentioned factors, a detailed strategic plan is being developed to redesign the Business Register to ensure that it is viable and relevant in the coming years. The major objectives of the redesign are to:

•      simplify the system and operational procedures,

•      improve accessibility to the Business Register database,

•      put together all the different modules developed over the years into a coherent and integrate system environment that is easy to maintain and,

•      provide the flexibility to integrate the Business Register information base with other external systems within the agency.

Many proposals are currently being studied and reviewed in order to meet the objectives of the redesign.  Some of them are briefly described below:

•      The four levels Statistical structure of complex enterprises (enterprise, company, establishment and location) that is used at Statistics Canada together with the sophisticated temporal organization of the Business Register Database have made the maintenance and future enhancements of the base a difficult task.  It is proposed that survey frames be derived directly from the operating structure (composed of investment, profit, cost or revenue center) instead of the statistical structure. This should simplify the system and improve data collection activities since the enterprise understand their operational structure. 

•      The temporal organization of the updates will be limited to capture the changes to a business at a given point in time instead of trying to record the chronological order of all economic events. 

•      The emphasis is on having one analyst assume responsibility for all updates made to a family of enterprises.  This is a fundamental change from the current scenario (where a person is responsible for only certain types of updates) and is made possible because current analysts have a more significant accounting background and higher level of education.  This fundamental change in philosophy would, on its own, require a redesign of the system to allocate the work differently.  This changed combined with a less sophisticated form of time travel should make updating of complex enterprises more straightforward.

•      The entire computer system environment has to be rebuild in order to achieve the objectives of the redesign.  It is the intend to have an environment that could easily be integrated with other processing system outside of the Business Register to provide a single entry point for information related to any given businesses. 

We expect to have a detailed work plan in the next few months establishing the time frame and the amount of resources required to achieve this ambitious initiative.  It is expected that this redesign would yield efficiencies and further improve the overall quality of the Business Register¡¯s database.