The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) is Northern Ireland's official statistics organisation with a workforce of about 300 employees, half of which are statisticians. The Agency also has responsibility for the registration of births, marriages, adoptions and deaths in Northern Ireland.
The Human Resource Research and Evaluation Branch (HRREB) supports the Personnel function of the Northern Ireland Civil Service. They act as an internal consultancy service who provide their skills and services to other branches. There are a number of different teams within this Branch including Absence Monitoring, Pay Bill Modelling, Equality Monitoring and HR Modelling. The Absence Monitoring team consists of Five Assistant Statisticians. Their work has developed over 2 years since a need to study and use Absence data was identified by Personnel and it is now an essential piece of Management Information. All members of the team use SPSS as their key analytical tool and it is essential to the work that they do.
Like most central government agencies, research data is stored remotely so that updating and retrieval can be made available to a wide audience. Due to the large file sizes, HRREB were experiencing network difficulties when trying to access remote files via SPSS client software. Subsequently, they found that storing files on their local machines was faster than trying to access them over the network but this had its drawbacks, namely that the data was not updated centrally, local PC configurations would have to be different for different people and required the use of large amounts of local memory.
Tony Mathewson, Principal Statistician at NISRA explains the situation, “Analysts’ time was being wasted because SPSS in local mode downloads data to the desktop machine to run standard reports”. This problem was exacerbated later in the day as more people were using the network for other jobs. “The increasing volumes of data also means we have to invest in increasingly powerful PCs in order for the analysts to do their work in an acceptable time frame”.
Ideally what NISRA needed was a way to minimise the need to move data across the network and use the processing power of the Server machine to run lengthy analysis. They also needed to be confident that any change in the way they worked would lead to noticeable processing improvements on the jobs they were running with minimum disruption.
NISRA decided to implement a totally scalable client/server version of SPSS. "By allowing the server to do the heavy computation work, we can now analyse data sets faster than ever before without affecting network traffic", says Mr Mathewson. Furthermore, large data sets are no longer an issue because SPSS Server eliminates file size limitations and the necessity of having powerful desktop machines to perform analyses.
SPSS Server is a flexible product that enables you to create a solution tailored to your organisation's unique environment. You can run SPSS Server on a variety of popular servers, including Windows NT/2000, Sun/Solaris and IBM AIX, they all communicate seamlessly with SPSS.
Mr Mathewson concludes, “We found that processing time on large files was reduced considerably. Files that used to take 40-50 minutes to run now take 4-5 minutes with very little strain on the network”.
Speed of analysis aside, the successful SPSS client server implementation at NISRA has provided other benefits such as increased return on investment from their quad-processor driven server, spending more time doing proactive work instead of waiting for analysis to run and enabling remote users secure access to data without the need for high bandwidth connections.
The complete list of global SPSS success stories can be found here
“We found that
processing time on large
files was reduced
considerably. Files that
used to take 40-50
minutes to run now take
4-5 minutes with very
little strain on the
network.”
- Tony Mathewson, Principal
Statistician. NISRA.
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