Finnish Immigration Service developing its statistical reporting to improve its operations

The Finnish Immigration Service is making the asylum process and reception operations more effective with the help of statistics in a project called Migstat. The main idea of the project is to develop the statistical reporting at the Finnish Immigration Service so that, for example, delays in work queues will be noticed earlier on the basis of statistics.

We will strive to utilise statistics more extensively than before in directing daily operations and allocating resources, also in situations where there is a sudden increase in the number of asylum seekers. The project also aims to put in place continuous user-led development of statistical reporting.

With statistics, it is already possible to allocate queues for asylum interviews and asylum decisions, for example, to Sections at different localities. If, according to the statistics, the work queues in a certain Section are long, the asylum interviews and decisions can be transferred to another Section with shorter queues.

Best practices from Denmark – more visual statistics

In March, staff from the Finnish Immigration Service went to Denmark to familiarise themselves with the statistical reporting of the Danish immigration authorities and the ways statistics are used in Denmark in the planning of daily operations as well as in the overall examination of the asylum process. We will apply the best practises from this trip in Finland; above all, the use of visual statistics in directing our daily operations.

In practise, this means that numeric charts will be replaced and completed with graphics and new statistical tools, which the user is able to modify to suit his or her own needs. These are above all dashboards and active reports. During this project the staff of the Finnish Immigration Service will also be trained to use new visual tools to plan, direct and evaluate the daily operations.

The project runs until the end of December 2016.

The Migstat project is funded by the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund of the European Union.

Further information for the media

Martin Airisto, Project Manager, Asylum Unit, Finnish Immigration Service, tel. +358 295 430 431 e-mail: forename.surname@migri.fi