Public holidays and long weekends notwithstanding, the machinery of official statistics has continued producing and disseminating data required for monitoring, measuring, evaluating and planning social and economic development.
The past three weeks have seen the release of data from a number of core series, including consumer and production price indices, quarterly financial statistics for municipalities, and private sector and labour market data.
The latest information on the manufacturing sector was released yesterday, while data on production and sales in the mining sector is due to be published today.
These form part of the 240 statistical releases, reports and other forms of publications on economic, social and population statistics which Statistics SA produces and disseminates each year. The quality of the data produced is obviously an essential element of official statistics.
But dissemination - including the appropriateness of data for different users of statistics, formats used, different media used in distribution (paper, digital, Web-based, static and interactive data, different levels of geography to which data can be attached, for example) - is also a key element in the cycle of official statistics.
During the 2006 Commonwealth Conference of Statisticians, hosted by Stats SA in Cape Town, Ben Kiregnera, the chair of the board of directors at the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, voiced the widely held criticism of the immense number of tables and figures that characterise publications produced by statisticians.
"Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink" was the way he characterised an oversupply of often unusable statistical detail.
In seeking to address this well-placed criticism, Stats SA undertook research to establish areas of concern in the presentation of its statistical publications.
The consumer price index (CPI) and the general household survey (GHS) are the most widely used publications within the economic and population statistical work areas. These were used as a basis for research focusing on the areas highlighted above.
The process included consultation with users of the CPI and GHS publications through focus group sessions during stakeholder workshops.
While the primary purpose of the workshops was the annual celebration of African Statistics Day on November 18, they also presented an opportunity to elicit feedback from users.
The feedback received from this consultative process is being used to re-engineer Stats SA publications.
New branding and the changed presentation of tables have already been introduced.
The consolidation of the Headline and Rural CPI publications into one in January and the subsequent introduction of the CPI at a glance are other changes introduced as a result of these consultations.
In response to a call for more information accessible to non-specialist users, a concise version of the time series publications outlining key findings will be made available at embargo time, while the detailed version will be made available on the Stats SA website.
Another new facility will allow for the dissemination of key figures through use of SMS or text-to-cellphone functionality.
Continuous improvement to data quality has long been a Stats SA goal.
Now the ongoing enhancement of dissemination tools and functionality is being added to this goal, allowing users of statistics to choose how they want to access official data, how that information should be delivered and the format best suited to their particular needs.