Social landlords must manage their assets to address safety issues, empowering staff to accurately record and manage data about assets should be the priority for social landlords. In this article originally for Housing Executive Peter Luke considers some of the impacts of the Building Safety Bill will have on existing Housing Management Systems.
As a recent social landlord health and safety report by the Welsh Regulator said, ‘If the data is not accurate, how do you know, you know what you think you know?’
Board competency is essential to ensure organisations are truly data driven. The consequences of poor data integrity are well known in the sector. Governance downgrades often cite decision making that is not consistently supported by accurate data, or the need for a landlord to undertake work to improve data quality, or ensure they have sufficient capability and capacity for this work to happen quickly.
Cultural fit and certainty of delivering benefits is a key challenge when looking at whether a social housing landlord should merge or remain independent. Whilst cultural fit is understandably not easy to model, operational efficiencies and other intended benefits are also difficult to forecast. There is no shortage of data in housing associations but harnessing and unifying this data in any merged organisation necessitates navigating the standardisation of different data sources, data flows and data practices.
Housing providers are increasingly being offered replacement options beyond the traditional stable of housing management software providers. In deciding which is the best for your business this blog attempts to answer a number of frequently asked questions and describes the role an enterprise data management platform can play in supporting the migration and ensuring that data quality issues are not simply replicated in the new systems.
Upgrading housing systems will undoubtedly bring benefits in terms of functionality but will highlight inherent data quality issues. By working with Illumar’s Housing Data Enterprise these can be tackled bringing assurance to the new system in terms of project timescales and cost.
Illumar are working closely with HACT to develop strategies enabling housing providers to take the next step in implementing UK Housing Data Standards. These standards have been developed by housing providers to enable better information, better decisions and to optimize performance.
The need for a centralised enterprise data management solution is being driven by every organisation gathering increasing amounts of data at an accelerated pace. Data analysts can only do their work if they have access to consistent, accurate and timely data.
Manually extracting data from multiple sources, especially where these include spreadsheets, is not only slow and labour-intensive; it can also result in wildly differing conclusions.
If governance grading is under review, is there a problem with the source of the data, how it has been transformed or how it is being interpreted. Or probably a combination of all the above.
Preparation for Board KPIs or the Quarterly Survey, Financial Forecast Return or Statistic Data Returns can start to highlight issues when the “single version of the truth” appears to have more than one version. This is the same source of data that is used for operational decision making.
This blog post from Tony Smith (thathousingITguy) reviews the Illumar product and how this provides “a major leg-up to pull in off the shelf data definitions, with the added layer of innovation around data quality.”