Data, when put to good use, can completely revolutionise the way a housing provider works. At Yorkshire Housing, we’re capturing and using data in new ways to transform our organisation from one that is reactive to one that is proactive.
I started my career in the manufacturing sector where one of my first projects was in data. It revealed to me how powerful and useful data can be to transform a business and streamline operations. Fed up with producing shift reports manually, I implemented an automated reporting system which did away with the previous reporting method of capturing information on paper.
Automated data capture and reporting
The automated reports were a revelation to the company. Reports could be accessed by production managers at the start of their shift, providing them with all the information they needed regarding what had happened during the previous shift. While it was a fairly basic data capture and output system, it meant that decisions could be made much faster and reject rates and scrappage were reduced considerably. What had come about partly through my own laziness produced something that the operational managers found fantastically useful.
Over the years, I found myself working with data in much more complex and beneficial ways, including managing analytics and online service development for charities, where the recognition of patterns in their call centre’s call volume meant they could adapt their resources to manage the peaks and troughs of busyness. One charity I worked with used data to track grant applications which allowed colleagues to see in real time the status of applications and what this meant for their output spend.
However, my move into housing felt like a step back in time, back to my experiences in manufacturing.
At the time, the housing sector had not kept pace technologically with the rest of the world. Even the basic data capture and output of automated reporting, which had transformed the manufacturing business I’d worked for 20 years ago at the start of my career, hadn’t been adopted.
My move to Yorkshire Housing presented a huge ambition; to elevate the organisation from one that is reactive (like most of the housing sector) to one that is proactive. The idea is to be able to fix problems before they occur and provide a seamless service for tenants and customers. Data is at the core of this aim.
Data governance
Starting from the ground up, the foundations need to be laid first. For me, this means ensuring a clear organisation-wide data governance policy which is understood across every department and at every level.
This means not only ensuring that the terminology is fully understood, but also how we measure different processes, how we determine the ownership of those processes, and the end-to-end execution of them. In other words, not just doing a job but recording it, too.
A plumber, for example, needs to record their jobs, the time taken and any parts used. This information allows us to analyse spending and resource usage in much more detail and optimise our operations to cut costs and improve efficiency. Designing a data capture method that makes this process easy and efficient will help us to capture accurate data without impeding on day-to-day operations.
Expertise
We’re also investing in expertise through the recruitment of a data architect, BI developers and analysts to build a team with a higher calibre of data expertise than I’ve ever worked with before. The team will work alongside other departments to make the data we capture accessible and allow our colleagues to be analysts as well.
We’re aiming to build a relationship across the organisation in which our analysts are working as business partners with our colleagues. This integration of data across the whole organisation opens up more possibilities for improving and automating processes, meaning that our agents can concentrate on adding value to the business and focus their attentions on providing services and extra support for those who need it.
Structured data and visual reporting
We’re currently working with Orchard on improving our data warehousing with the aim of integrating Orchard Data with the other tools and systems we’re already using as well as with our finance and accounts systems. Our aim is to bring data into a structured space so that we can consistently deliver the right reporting at the right time.
Working visually is often the best approach to ensure that data can be understood and analysed quickly, and we’re introducing various software and tools which will allow us to create efficient and comprehensive reporting. We’ll build the reporting to allow us to drill down to more in-depth data to allow colleagues at all levels, not only managers, to understand the context of what they’re doing each day.
From reactive to predictive
The move from a reactive to predictive model requires a different sort of data. Using our current data capture techniques, we have lots of data that tells us what’s already happened, but we need to get to the data that predicts a future event and prompts us to take action.
A classic example is smart home technology. Smart boilers, for instance, have the ability to transmit data back to tell us what’s happening. If there’s a blip or something unusual in the pattern of data we receive, it could be an indication that something is about to go wrong and we could use this to trigger a preventative maintenance appointment with the customer automatically so they’re not left without heating or hot water.
Another example could be the frequency with which somebody is logging in to check their rent statements. An increased frequency could be an indication that something is happening that might be affecting them financially and that might be an early-warning signal that they’re about to go into arrears. Looking for these sorts of trends and triggers can help us to elevate our customer service to a new level. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a proactive call or conversation with that tenant to provide reassurance, prevent them from going into arrears and act before they find themselves in a real crisis?
The internet of things
Another avenue we’re starting to look at is how to care for older people. As part of our work with an independent living scheme for older persons, we’re trialling IoT devices that monitor movement in people’s homes. These include detectors that can register if someone has walked past a monitor or a device that plugs into an electrical socket which can recognise when the kettle has been boiled.
Using these devices, it’s possible to analyse patterns of behaviour and understand when people need support, telling us when we need to do targeted interventions and proactively make wellbeing calls to vulnerable people. The more we can implement these sorts of smart technology, the more we can start to understand how people live and fit our services around that to have the greatest impact.
Of course, this sort of technology has legal, privacy and ethical implications, and the more insight we gather into how people are living, the more how we handle data governance plays on my mind. Just because we can tell that every day a tenant gets up and puts the kettle on at 8am doesn’t mean we should use that information.
Questions surrounding what the information is being used for and where freedoms and privacy are being infringed on is a huge grey area. With this in mind, we’re establishing practices so that we’re continually reviewing data capture methods and working out ways in which they can do good for our service users without crossing a line. For example, in our trials with IoT devices that track movement in independent living properties, the data produced is accessed by the tenants’ relatives via an app, rather than by the housing provider, with full permission from the tenants themselves.
The future
At Yorkshire Housing, we still have a lot of work to do to lay the foundations and put systems in place to ensure we’re capturing the right data and structuring it in a way that produces useful and insightful reports.
We’re working closely with Orchard to develop systems that meet the needs of the organisation and our tenants, including the development of automation within our operations, and how we manage and structure the data we gather with a data warehousing solution to consolidate our systems. The aim is to have everything closely integrated, with data flowing quickly and seamlessly between systems. Orchard’s absolutely fantastic technical teams are metaphorically putting square pegs into round holes to make this happen.
With Orchard, we’ve also begun to take advantage of the increased processing capabilities that come from using the cloud, which puts us about 18 months away from adopting machine learning and AI technologies – something we’re already talking to Microsoft about to work out how we do this. Orchard’s roadmap is leading in the same direction, nicely complementing our own ambitions.
In terms of the housing sector as a whole, Yorkshire Housing is in the middle of the pack when it comes to the level of sophistication of our data capturing and usage. We’re not at the back, but we’re not at the front either.
Across the housing sector, we’re seeing lots of little experiments and trials with smart homes and IoT devices, and we need to keep doing these to understand exactly what the data can tell us. Housing, however, is behind lots of other business sectors in the data revolution and it’s time we embraced the possibilities and influenced the development of new data-based systems and innovations.
Stephen Thorlby-Coy is the head of ICT at Yorkshire Housing.
