Cyprus Statistical Service wins innovation award for census

The Statistical Service of Cyprus (CYSTAT) received the “Innovation award 2011 for the public sector” on October 3 for the innovative Cyprus Blaise Integrated Census System (CY-BICS) which was developed for the population census that took place in the Republic of Cyprus in October 2011.
The Cyprus Innovation Awards were established by the Employers’ and Industrialists Federation (OEB) with the support of the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism and the Research Promotion Foundation.
The census in 2011 was conducted on a high-tech basis, with interviewers keying questions directly into small computers.
CYSTAT developed CY-BICS in collaboration with Statistics Netherlands in order to capture the census data by applying the Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) method and to incorporate innovative and highly automated technologies for the production of accurate data quickly and efficiently at a low cost.
CY-BICS consists of four applications: Electronic Questionnaire, Supervisors’ Application, District Officers’ Application and the Central Application.
CY-BICS, which involved direct data entry, editing and coding in netbooks, removed the need for printing questionnaires and manual work after data collection. It therefore resulted in significant cost savings of an estimated 25%.
In addition, the data editing during the interviews but also the editing in near real time by the supervisors and the assistant district officers contributed to the collection of high quality data and improved coverage. This meant that the first preliminary results were published immediately after the end of the census.
With CY-BICS the public was also informed about the progress in data collection throughout the census period.