Besides conducting a comprehensive needs assessment that helps adequately define the user needs and identify the available resources within the NSO and in the country, particularly the funding requirements, we need to consider critical factors to succeed in a full digital GIS-based census program. Chief among these factors are:
- ensuring senior management commitment to developing a long-term digital program;
- building the technical and human capacities required for sustaining the GIS-based systems and databases and setting up an independent unit for cartography and GIS activities within the NSO;
- using technical standards;
- forming a partnership to work together with the NMA and other groups that do things with geospatial information; and
- choosing the appropriate methodology of integration of the new geospatial technologies with the census mapping operations (compatibility).
These factors are revealed by survey-based study findings and lessons learned from country experiences during the last round of censuses in 2010.
See details in Australia Programme Review and the related background paper on Developing a Statistical Geospatial Framework in National Statistical Systems: Survey of Linking Geospatial Information to Statistics—Analysis of Questionnaire Responses (2013), available at https://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/44th-session/documents, and the UNSD report on the Results of a Survey on Census Methods Used by Countries in the 2010 Census Round, available at https://unstats.un.org/unsd/censuskb20/KnowledgebaseArticle10696.aspx.