SPSS - UK Customers

Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency

IBM SPSS Statistics Base* Server enhances speed and scalability

The situation

The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) is Northern Ireland's official statistics organisation. It has a workforce of about 300 employees, half of whom 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. It acts as an internal consultancy service, providing skills and services to other branches. There are a number of different teams within this branch, including Absence Monitoring, Pay Bill Modeling, Equality Monitoring, and HR Modeling. The Absence Monitoring team consists of five assistant statisticians, and their work has developed since a need to study and use absence data was identified by the Personnel team: it is now an essential piece of management information. All members of the team use IBM SPSS Statistics Base as a key analytical tool, and it is essential to the work that they do.

The challenge

As in most central government agencies, research data is stored remotely so that updating and retrieval can be carried out by geographically dispersed users. Due to the large file sizes, HRREB were experiencing network difficulties when trying to access remote files using IBM SPSS Statistics Base client software. Storing files on their local machines was faster than trying to access them over the network, but this had the disadvantages that the data was not updated centrally; local PC configurations were different for different people; and large amounts of local memory were needed.

Tony Mathewson, Principal Statistician at NISRA explains the situation: “Analysts’ time was being wasted because IBM SPSS Statistics Base, in local mode, downloads data to the desktop machine to run standard reports.” This problem was exacerbated later in the day when more people were using the network for other jobs. “The increasing volume of data also meant we had to invest in increasingly powerful PCs so that the analysts could do their work in an acceptable time,” he adds.

NISRA needed a way to minimise the movement of data across the network. They also needed to be confident that any change in the way they worked would lead to minimum disruption and noticeable processing improvements.

The solution

NISRA decided to implement a totally scalable client/server version of IBM SPSS Statistics Base. "By allowing the server to do the heavy computation work, we can now analyse datasets faster than ever without affecting network traffic," says Mr Mathewson. Furthermore, large datasets are no longer an issue because IBM SPSS Statistics Base Server* eliminates file size limitations – and the need to have powerful desktop machines to perform analyses.

IBM SPSS Statistics Base Server is a flexible product that can create a solution tailored to an organisation's unique environment. It runs on a variety of popular platforms, including Windows® Servers; Sun™ Solaris™; IBM AIX®; Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®; or HP-UX.

We found that the processing time for large files was reduced considerably. Files that used to take 40-50 minutes to run now take four to five minutes, with very little strain on the network.
Tony Mathewson
Principal Statistician
NISRA

The results

Mr Mathewson concludes: “We found that the processing time for large files was reduced considerably. Files that used to take 40-50 minutes to run now take four to five minutes, with very little strain on the network.”

Speed of analysis aside, the successful IBM SPSS Statistics Base Server implementation at NISRA has provided other benefits such as increased return on investment from their quad processor‑driven server, which now spends more time working, and enabling remote users to access data securely without the need for high bandwidth connections.

Interested in enhancing speed and scalability with IBM SPSS Statistics Base Server? Download the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency PDF here.

*IBM SPSS Statistics Base and IBM SPSS Statistics Base Server, formerly called SPSS Statistics Base, , formerly SPSS Base Server, are part of SPSS Inc.’s Predictive Analytics Software portfolio.