Consolidation and Standardization of Survey Operations at a Decentralized Federal Statistical Agency

With tighter federal budgets on the horizon, the National Agricultural Statistics Service decided in 2009 to pursue three architectural transformations, primarily to provide savings in staff resource costs by enabling the centralization or regionalization of survey operations. The transformational initiatives involved: (1) centralizing and consolidating network services from 48 locations; (2) standardizing survey metadata and integrating survey data into easily accessible databases across all surveys; and (3) consolidating and generalizing survey applications for the agency’s diverse survey program. The three architectural transformations will be described as well as initial efforts to consolidate and standardize survey operations across the agency.