Most DIM data products are censuses of register data in a cross-section to the day which are suited for a wide variety of research purposes in the field of labour market and occupational research. The Data Production Team systematically updates, maintains and develops the data and system landscape based on technical requirements of the IAB.

Requirements management
ensures controlled and goal-oriented processing of requests from the research projects.

Areas of responsibility in the implementation

• Project-specific research & feasibility studies
  • Basic research on the basis of more or less concrete research ideas or to be evaluated legal or organizational changes in the field of social benefits to find out whether and in which form appropriate process data accessible for the IAB are available.
  • explorative feasibility studies if a completely new and unknown data field is required for the research question
     
• Continuous monitoring of current developments
  • Inclusion in a BA-wide network to constantly monitor the changes in operational IT processes and data structures of the BA feeding into the register data base.
     
• Identification of expansion or improvement possibilities of data base and processing routines
  • Planning of required adjustment work or developments interesting for research
  • Design of both the functional specifications as well as the necessary system architectures and algorithms.
  • Marking or clean-up of data quality problems
  • Standardization and automation of recurring requirements
     
• Management of coordination processes in the IAB and networking
  • Professional exchange with the researchers of IAB for the products to be in line with demands in the end
  • Networking with the Research Data Centre (Forschungsdatenzentrum, (FDZ)) of the BA, which provides external scientists with anonymized samples of DIM products or standard data sets derived from that.
     
• Maintenance and updating
  • Regularly updating of the existing research data base with reliable release times
  • Elaborate recurring processing work for individual IAB units (e.g., drawing and preparation of the sample of integrated basic security biographies (Stichprobe Integrierter Grundsicherungsbiografien (SIG)).
  • Maintenance of the program codes for the contact data drawing essential for the implementation of surveys
     
• Information, documentation and training
  • Reduction of dependency on individual experts by extensive documentation of the processing routines and therefore stability of data production.
  • To create transparency: annotated program codes, product manuals, quality assurance concepts, instruction manuals and technical (data) set descriptions.
  • Additional meta-data formats to enable or facilitate working with the data products