Adapting to Recent Changes in IT Environment in Communicating Statistics

The Bank of Korea has operated its Economic Statistics System (ECOS for short) in an additional website fordelivering economic statistics on the main sectors of the Korean Economy. The system covers financial economicstatistics, national account statistics and various business and consumer survey statistics. It was designed toprovide statistics to policymakers and the public in a timely and convenient manner by strengthening many usefulfunctions such as statistic search, fluctuation rate calculation, chart drawing and data retrieval. Theseconveniences are mainly implemented based on access to Internet Explorer (IE), coupled with installation into theuser’s browser of so-called “ActiveX” plug-in reusable software components. However, due to the recent growth ofnon-IE browser markets and of security issues associated with the “ActiveX” components, the Bank of Korea iscurrently migrating into a new system that will allow access via any browser and be more in compliance with webstandards. In this presentation, we discuss our efforts for migration to state-of-the-art multi-browser access withadditional capability for mobile data access, for example by “smart-phone” users.