Sogeti Luxembourg awarded a big data contract by the European Commission

Luxembourg, 04/01/2016 - The goal of this project is to provide assistance to the Eurostat Task Force Big Data (Directorate DDG: Deputy Director-General) concerning ethical, communicational, legal, skills issues and the methodological cooperation related to the use of big data in European Statistics.

Sogeti Luxembourg S.A. will lead a Consortium composed by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia who is the main producer and coordinator of national statistics in Slovenia and experts in the legal subject, the communication strategy and the training program.

Recent innovations in the information and communication technologies have been leading to an increasing degree of digitization of economies and societies that offer new opportunities for the compilation of statistics, while the use of big data for statistical purposes challenges and urges the European Statistical System to effectively address a variety of issues. Big Data represent new opportunities and challenges for Official Statistics. Further, the European Statistical System (ESS) and its partners are encouraged to effectively examine the potential of Big Data sources in that regard. The European Statistical System Committee (ESSC) requested Eurostat and the National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) to elaborate an ESS action plan and roadmap. The ESSC emphasized that "legal and ethical issues related to big data access and use, as well as the development of the appropriate skills, are of strategic importance and should be given high priority".

The project aims at assisting Eurostat in the preparation of incorporating Big Data sources and implementing Big Data techniques and methodologies on ESS level in due consideration of the particular ethical and legal requirements of official statistics. In order to satisfy this expectation, the contract is divided into five individual tasks: (1) Ethical review and guidelines, (2) Communication strategy, (3) Legal review, (4) Development of a training strategy to bridge the big data skills gap in European official statistics and (5) Facilitated ESS Big Data workshop.

“I would like to thank the European Commission for entrusting Sogeti Luxembourg this assignment” says Eric de Saqui, CEO Sogeti BeLux. “We are looking forward to apply our expertise in the field of statistics to deliver this complex project in a successful way.”