About company

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution, headquartered in Washington, D.C., consisting of 190 countries.

https://www.imf.org/en/Home

Industry

Finance

Location

USA

Challenge

International Monetary Fund was looking for a solution that is capable to cover all stages of GSBPM with the primary focus on data collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination.

The goal of the exercise was to standardize terminology, document statistical processes, establish a standard framework for benchmarking and facilitate use common tools and methodologies.

Issue 1: Quality of Input Data

No standardization of data submission format
No standardization of data quality (units of measurement, seasonal adjustment)
Lack of metadata and transparency

Issue 2. Work Inefficiency

A large variety of applications needed to, separately, process data, create metadata, produce reports and more
Significant labor resources required (and a higher likelihood of human errors)

Issue 3. Business Risk and Response Time

Business continuity risk: Large complex programming, based on statistical packaged, are used to generate data output
Slow response time to analyzing global economic changes
Difficulty in protection of confidential forecast data

Issue 4. Limitation on Publication Diversity

A lot of effort and time is required to revise/add data output (including tables, charts, maps)
Potential dependency and time lag on drawing IT department’s assistance in producing new publication output (e.g. web reports)

Solution

Developed solution consists of two seamlessly integrated parts – the data management solution (EcOS) and the open data portal for data dissemination (EDD application).

Data Management solution (EcOS) fully covers all stages of:

Data and metadata design tools (data warehouse, relational metadata management tool, data and metadata definitions)
Data collection, including usage of data and metadata repositories, based on DBMS, data import and export from various types of sources
Data transformation and validation (modelling and forecasting tool, GAP analysis, verification of import and export results in consolidated datasets,

Data Management solution also provides capabilities for routine task scheduling and building an automated process for each stage described above.

Data Dissemination solution is an open data portal https://data.imf.org/ that is supplied with integrated portal designer tool.

Solution to Issue 1. Quality of Input Data

Country economists are free to submit data (and metadata) in a variety of formats and transmit both directly to the Data Management system.
Metadata allows users to attach qualitative information and expert knowledge to the data, including data source, units of measurement, explanation of data trends.

Solution to Issue 2. Work Inefficiency

A proper Data Management covers the end-to-end data and metadata needs:
- Data exchange (import/export) and metadata management
- Calculations with a friendly user-interface (no programming required)
- Validations to systematically check data quality
- Reports to present a variety of output
- Tasks to govern and automate production workflow

Solution to Issue 3. Business Risk and Slow Response Time

A visual interface, and no programming required
Users can dedicate time on sharing their expert knowledge instead of doing manual data checks and fixes
The backend of the Data Management tool allows database administrators to grant/remove user access, protecting confidential data at different stages of production workflow

Solution to Issue 4. Limitation on Publication Diversity

Users have full control to create their charts, maps, reports.
These reports can be shared via publications, on the web, through mobile solutions and more.
Both data and metadata can be shared.

Results

Data management and dissemination solutions successfully operate for the last 10 years at IMF service. As a result of thorough work of IMF internal departments users have access to statistical data portals for the most of IMF flagship products such as Balance of Payments (BOP), International Financial Statistics (IFS), Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS), Financial Soundness Indicators (FSI), Government Finance Statistics (GFS) and etc.

32+

IMF datasets available 24/7

1000

internal and external users

1000000

open data portal visits per month