Australian Bureau of Statistics leverages AWS for digital census

Digitising the Australian census in 2021 was critical for the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in driving inclusivity and accessibility, according to Teresa Dickinson, deputy Australian statistician at the ABS.

Teresa Dickinson, deputy Australian statistician at the Australian Bureau of Statistics

The ABS leveraged AWS cloud in collaboration with PwC to deliver the Census Digital Service (CDS) last year.

Dickinson spoke at the AWS Summit in Canberra yesterday and told audiences, “In the three years leading up to the census, we worked collaboratively with PwC and AWS to bring our vision to life and to build a census digital solution that was secure, innovative and could deliver performance at the scale that we knew would be required.”

The CDS was not only the online census form, but also included the census website, a content management system and self-service facilities, she said.

According to Dickinson, a key measure of success for the ABS was positive feedback from the public.

“Many [members of the public] were very effusive about how easy the form was to navigate. Whether that was on a phone, a tablet, an Xbox, and even the three people who did it on their Tesla,” she said.

Pointing to the key metrics, Dickinson noted that by the end of census night 52 percent of Australian households had completed their form online, with the online tool serving over 2.5 million users in a 24-hour period, receiving a total of 7.7 million online forms.

“Interestingly, for those aged over 80, 42 percent returned their census online,” she said.

At its peak, submitters completed over 143 forms per second at 8.05pm on census night, without the system experiencing any downtime.

According to Dickinson, the key element to delivering a successful digital experience came down to trust and communication with their AWS partners.

“There was great communication at all levels. So, we knew what was happening. We knew when things were going well, we knew when things were a bit behind, or if it was difficult to find an answer to a problem,” she said.

She also highlighted the importance of a problem-solving mindset.

“In such a large, complex, high-stake build things are not always going to go to plan and on numerous occasions, AWS designed and brokered solutions to problems with and on behalf of the ABS and of course in doing that worked with PwC.”

Velvet-Belle travelled to Canberra for the AWS Public Sector Summit as a guest of AWS Australia.