At a time when housing providers are struggling to make every penny count, some IT teams are considering creating new in-house systems integration teams. Manifest Software Solutions prides itself on being the leading independent provider of systems integration in social housing and challenges the lack of market testing around decisions to do-it-yourself, decisions that often commit housing providers to millions of pounds of annual costs.
Talking to a packed room at the Housing Technology 2024 conference, Manifest surprised the audience by stressing that IT people in our sector are only there to support their housing colleagues; it’s our housing colleagues who save lives and improve living conditions for millions of people. We stated it because those of us in IT always need to remember why we’re here, otherwise it’s very easy to get distracted by the latest IT toys.
Manifest is an unusual software company in that both founders have worked for over 35 years in social housing and have first-hand experience working for local authorities and housing providers, both in IT management and delivering front-line services. After identifying pain points in service delivery, we went on to found successful software companies that addressed the key issues we experienced while working in housing, including developing a mobile-working solution for housing that was highest rated in 2013 by Housing Technology readers. For the last ten years we have been developing and implementing fully-managed systems integration solutions for social housing providers across the UK.
Requirements gathering
The starting point for any systems integration has nothing to do with technology. As soon as people mention systems integration, they often start talking about SOAP and REST, JSON and XML, and interfaces and APIs, but those aren’t what’s important when building a successful integration service.
If you want to build a house, you go to an architect to draw up a plan; you don’t ask a digger driver what size digger he has and design your house around that. You want someone to design what you want and need, not what they know how to build.
We believe solutions architects and business analysts are the real power behind successful solutions implementation and design; those people know how to use the systems used by the business. They are the knowledgeable people talking regularly to the business about their needs, clearly documenting requirements with a clear list of success criteria. These people are usually best being a part of the in-house team owing to their regular contact with the housing teams. Being extremely versatile, they capture requirements, test the delivered products and train the business users. If we could ask in-house IT teams to employ more people, it would be architects and analysts who understand housing systems and who can help their colleagues in the business get more from their IT systems.
A good business analyst will look at a requirement and look at a wide variety of possible solutions, often finding systems integration isn’t needed or that it’s already available within the existing systems. If you ask a computer programmer how to do anything, the answer will always be to write a computer program. If you ask a systems integrator how to do something, they will develop some systems integration using their favourite framework. Their job isn’t to look for cost-effective alternatives for the business.
We often hear that in-house systems integration teams have lots of integration to do. However, it’s not always clear if the work they are doing is actually necessary. If an organisation has a team of people available to work, the normal thing is to find work to keep them busy.
However, being busy doing something isn’t the same as being busy doing something necessary. How do IT teams determine that the annual cost of a team of full-time integration developers is delivering justifiable business benefits? This is why we strongly recommend working with a knowledgeable in-house business analyst (or similar) who will only approve worthwhile bespoke integration when the business needs it.
Approved integration work is normally issued to an external specialist to do the development for an agreed fixed price. As the amount of integration work reduces, the costs of using an external specialist will reduce, but with a full-time in-house integration team, the natural thing will be to keep finding work for them. A cost-conscious business analyst working with an external specialist company can therefore save an organisation a huge amount of money over three to five years.
Coding
If the requirements from the business analysts are good and have clear success criteria, the actual setting up of integration should be relatively simple and certainly nothing to throw huge amounts of money at.
At Manifest, we receive the requirements and set up the integration along with self-monitoring processes and dashboards, at which point we then hand the integration over to a dedicated support team. Most of the time, setting up the integration is faster than expected because we already have standard connectors for all the main systems used in housing (something that in-house teams won’t have).
Our advice is to employ business analysts and IT support people, and to avoid employing full-time coders and systems integration staff. Developer roles are hugely expensive and the development environments they need to do their jobs are a huge annual cost for the business. In our opinion, there are much better things to spend money on in our sector. To be clear, we aren’t talking here about a couple of people who customise workflows in Dynamics; we’re suggesting that it isn’t cost-effective to have in-house teams doing large-scale integration or systems development.
This might all sound like the sort of thing a company like ours would say, but we are happy to be compared with any in-house team or company. Can the same be said for an in-house IT team, and do they have the same scrutiny? It is the lack of market testing and evidence of value for money that might be of concern to the business. If proven to be the cheapest and/or best compared with external companies, then of course it makes sense to use an in-house team, but we don’t see those comparisons being made.
To us, the advantages of outsourcing integration are clear. A private company that specialises in integration will have experience, knowledge and resources that in-house teams can’t realistically compete with, however much money they spend.
We have standard off-the-shelf integration with nearly every system used in housing. We have staff with huge amounts of housing knowledge and systems integration skills, including staff who have worked for the big HMS suppliers (not easy people to find). We also have strong relationships with a lot of the main system suppliers, allowing us to bypass standard support and go straight to senior managers and directors when we need to. All of this gives huge advantages to a private integration company over an in-house team.
Value for money
We find it difficult to see how bringing systems integration in-house makes financial sense. We fully accept that, regardless of our extensive experience in housing IT, that we might be wrong; we would welcome evidence of market testing and value for money comparisons between in-house integration teams and a specialist integration company like ours. However, to date we haven’t seen any such evidence.
If we take a simple example of a housing provider employing two systems integrators and paying for a systems integration tool and a couple of servers, they will be looking at a cost of around £200,000 per year. It’s worth noting that teams of five or even 10 in-house integration staff are not uncommon, bringing costs to well over half a million pounds every year.
As a comparison, a G-Cloud-procured legal contract for the support of an unlimited number of interfaces in an organisation, between any number of cloud or on-premise systems, all provided by an external specialist, is less than £42,000 per year. This includes a mutually-agreed SLA and is backed by a whole team of people with a combined experience far exceeding those that a housing provider might employ.
There’s an argument that an external company’s day-rate is higher than the cost of an in-house member of staff. That’s almost certainly the case, but if the external company does the work in a fifth of the time, absorbs all the software and support costs in the annual charge, then that day-rate actually looks very attractive.
To sum up
We often hear comments from users saying that something they asked for was impossible (we get a lot of our business this way). What we tend to find is that the person who was asked didn’t know how to do it. With experienced staff at your side, who have integrated every housing management system and have over 30+ years’ experience integrating housing IT systems, a lot more things become possible.
We recently saw this when working with a housing provider integrating Dynamics with its housing management system. It had chosen to standardise on one of the latest expensive cloud-hosted integration frameworks and even contracted a huge firm of experts with experience using their chosen integration framework.
After six months, they hadn’t successfully integrated a single piece of functionality. During a chance encounter at one of Housing Technology’s annual conferences, we were asked to take a look and two weeks later we had completed all the integration. That’s the difference between paying a lot of money and working with people who integrate housing systems every day.
Every housing provider’s IT team will need to make their own decisions about what they think is best for their organisation. We would simply urge them to have open and transparent talks with the experts who are out there and make informed decisions. Manifest is naturally always happy to help in any way we can.
Alan Swift is the technical director and founder of Manifest Software Solutions.
