Automated business data collection: Experiences in Portugal and The Netherlands

Completing survey questionnaires can be quite burdensome for businesses. Important reasons for this are the retrieval of the required data from internal data sources and the computation of the answers to the questions. With IT technologies, like submitting XML files, web services and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), this process can be automated. With a growing number of businesses using electronic business information systems, automated data collection becomes more and more in reach. In this paper we will discuss how automated data collection can be implemented in practice, and explore its advantages and challenges, both from the statistical agency as well as the business perspective, based on experiences with cases in tourism, financial data and agriculture at Statistics Portugal and Statistics Netherlands as presented at the International Conference on Establishment Statistics-VII in 2024. The cases show that the technology works, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be adopted by businesses. To successfully implement this data collection method investments by National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) and businesses are needed. Important considerations for businesses are e.g., the information systems they use, their own benefits, and trust in the NSI and the automated collection system. It seems most applicable for stable and recurring data reports, retrieving data from one centralized database.