New Zealand Agency Delivers Key Stats Over the Web

Web access has opened up the world of governmental communication to the general public, nowhere more so than at New Zealand's Accident Compensation Corp. (ACC), which plans to deliver its key indicators quarterly over the Web rather than solely in an annual printed report.

The ACC turned to SAS consulting services and software solutions to achieve this goal.

"My objective was to formalise the ad hoc nature of generating the injury statistics – to design and build a program which was reusable, customisable, self-documenting, and able to handle all the output requirements. Previously, this was done on an ad hoc basis, with 10 different programs used to generate tables," says ACC consultant Tom Robinson. "We chose SAS, as they could provide the best solution for accomplishing this task in a short time frame. ODS, the SAS technology used, is a very easy way of getting information out of SAS and into other products."

Using a developer version of ODS, Robinson took a month to write the program, which can generate HTML for direct publishing to the Web, data for Adobe® Acrobat to generate PDF files and data for the design company to create a printed report. This means that while the output format and number or type of tables are different for each medium, everyone is receiving the same numbers.

ACC will continue to issue a printed report of accident statistics to meet library requirements, but will eventually phase this out. The ability to deliver information over the Web increases the frequency of available statistics by six months over the printed copy, and plans are to produce the statistics quarterly.

ODS also opens the door for other publications and reports to be delivered on the Web, Robinson says.

ODS allows users to:

• Produce output data sets from procedure output.
• Customise reports created by procedures.
• Send output to a variety of destinations.
• Select or exclude components of the output.
• Organise and manage output in the results folder of the results window.

SAS account manager Alan Medder says, "The advantage to organisations of ODS is that it is now much easier to publish than to go through the rigmarole of formal publishing and make significant cost savings. Static pages can be utilised so they appear to be more than static, allowing drill-down. This is a big help in terms of, say, a ministerial inquiry.

"ODS has given SAS the freedom to concentrate on enabling quality output and graphics. Before, our main thrust was on how to deliver power and data manipulation."

ODS has four destinations: data, HTML, text output and printing devices. It takes just two lines of code to enact any one of these. Thus, information can be sent consistently to each destination.

With its annual injury statistics report costing around NZ$50,000 (US$21,215) to print, ACC not only expects monetary savings, but it is also making its statistics much more readily available for its own internal and external use.

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