To celebrate their100th edition, Housing Technology invited a few of their longest-standing contributors to share their views on how the technology and business landscape has changed over the past 15-20 years, the milestones along the way, and what they think the future holds. I was one of those who responded. Unfortunately when it was published I was recovering from illness and didn’t get chance to promote. Here’s what I said…
What was the IT landscape in housing like towards the end of the 2000s?
I’m a late starter, a housing techie for only the last ten years when I became Director of Digital at large housing association. I’ve just been looking back at an HT article I wrote titled Halfway to Amazon in 2017. It was all about channel shift: contact centres, websites and mobile working.
As a change agent rather than a traditional IT leader, I was interested in the impact on customers, colleagues, and culture. The system we had was universally disliked because of a difficult implementation. I worked hard to build a relationship with the supplier and leverage the undoubted features and benefits. The system has endured and the lesson I learnt was that systems are fairly generic, because housing processes are fairly standard. Like pain killers, they provide solutions but in different ways. But it is the trusted doctor-patient relationship that is the most important.
How has the role and importance of technology in housing changed along the way?
Since I started consulting five years ago, the first question I get asked by clients is “what is the best housing* management system”? Well pick a card, any card! Your system is the best system, because you’ve bought and paid for it. So make the best of it.
However. The emphasis has changed in recent years, from systems to data.
The role and importance of technology is to serve you data, information and insights. And sadly, the majority of systems are poor at providing data out of the box. Or boxes. Our quest for THE system has caused data quality and integrity problems, not least because we’ve treated the box like a box room or attic; just stuff things out of the way in case we might need them one day.
What have been the most significant IT/business milestones during that time?
If you read the press, not just the technology press, then you might think it’s Artificial Intelligence. I think that is significant, but only because of the potential impact on people and their jobs as they are currently structured. And hopefully in a very positive way of empowerment and enabling people.
All of the notable changes in housing technology have been reactions to the wider workplace: Grenfell and fire safety and compliance records, Covid-19 and hybrid working tools, Regulator Consumer Regulation and the Housing Ombudsman driving a new focus on data.
The big techie stuff that’s driving efficiency and effectiveness in commerce: GenAI, IOT, Blockchain, Cloud, Big Data is overlooked in mainstream social housing.
What’s the future of technology [and associated business processes] over the next five years?
Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services are the emerging “systems”. Apart from anything else they provide safety and security in numbers, minimising cyber threats and curating accessible data.
In some ways I am sad we haven’t settled on some technologies that align with our culture. We don’t, as a sector like the prospect that somebody will make money out of us, whether it’s big tech, or big consulti
ng. We think any spare money needs to go on front line services and residents. More technology investment, we fear, does not improve health, education or housing, it only makes commercial profit.
So the only way to generate an alternative is to come together, to collaborate better. And that’s why I and several colleagues have created the **Open Data Exchange** (ODX) with the aim to stimulate innovation and collaboration through open and shared data. Everybody knows that reliable, real-time data is key to ensuring that homes are safe, decent, and well-maintained. Our vision is to unlock the potential of property data and give ownership of the data to residents to influence decisions about their home.
You can read more contributions at Housing Technology.
