Case Study: U.S. Census Bureau achieves digitized data collection and major productivity gains with Pegasystems

U.S. Census Bureau reduces complexity and significantly increases savings

The U.S. Census Bureau faced the massive challenge of modernizing the Decennial Census from a largely paper-based process to a reliable, scalable digital system for 2020 while also streamlining partner engagement. The Bureau needed an integrated solution to collect and process responses across web, phone, paper and field channels, coordinate hundreds of thousands of field assignments, and automate communications with roughly 400,000 partner organizations — all with high availability and the ability to react in real time to low-response areas and unexpected events.

The Bureau deployed the Pega Government Platform as its ECaSE data-collection backbone and a new CRM for partner management, adding Survey and Field Operational Control, a mobile app for enumerators, multichannel response processing, and automated partner outreach. The results: zero system downtime, about 63% household response by July (more than 92 million households), 80% of self-responses online, substantial productivity gains (tests showed a ~48.6% increase and field rates reached ~1.9 cases/hour), and the Census was 90% complete six weeks ahead of schedule.

U.S. Census Bureau

Zachary Schwartz

Division Chief, IT Service Management Office