Richard Troote, head of ICT at Wales & West Housing and chair of the Community Housing Cymru IT Network, and Henk Korevaar, founder of F-fectis, reflect on an international collaboration to find value for money (VFM) within housing providers’ IT departments.
Relevance of IT benchmarking
The number of housing providers contributing to IT benchmarking has seen a downward trend for a number of years. More and more IT professionals are finding that the data just doesn’t help explain the VFM story within their organisation. The result is that the pool of associations providing data is falling and has become a self-fulfilling prophecy where only associations with perceived good profiles are carrying out benchmarking. This leaves IT departments having to find alternative ways to measure and demonstrate VFM in their operations.
Dutch success story
For over 13 years, members of Netwit, the Dutch peer group for IT professionals in housing, have shared information on their respective total costs of ownership (TCO). Members get together once a year to share their individual stories, explain any anomalies and to learn from each other’s experiences. This has been well received in the Dutch housing sector and continues to be a popular way of measuring and understanding VFM. Henk Korevaar presented this story at Housing Technology’s conference in 2012 and, after a number of meetings, we agreed to attempt a joint Dutch/Welsh project.
Translating to a Welsh scenario
16 Welsh housing providers, all members of the Community Housing Cymru IT Network, got together to understand VFM in the sector. The goal was to establish a formula that would reduce or eliminate any factors that hindered comparison of IT services between different associations.
How it all happened
The first meeting explored the differences between the 16 organisations and the factors which created additional costs on IT departments. Factors included the complexity of service and geographical distribution of housing stock. By the end of the workshop, a consensus was reached and a first version of a ‘mathematical formula’ was produced. This formula was then applied to each association and the results compared. Unfortunately, the formula didn’t produce a correlation; ambiguities and differences still existed and this meant a rethink was needed.
The second workshop looked more deeply at the cost drivers of each association’s IT department and attempted to understand how those drivers affected the VFM environment. This proved very useful and considerable progress was made. The final workshop took those cost drivers and refined them into the four themes of people, hardware, software and services to create categories where comparisons could be attempted.
The outcomes
While the goal of a single formula eluded us, a significant step forward has been achieved in understanding the cost drivers of IT in housing. Insights from the Dutch experience and investigations into the cost drivers associated with providing IT services in housing have improved the participants understanding of VFM in individual organisations.
The future
The learning process will continue and will also provide an answer to the question ‘Is IT bench-marking an exercise in its own right or is it part of a wider strategy?’ Benchmarking (or maybe even better, bench-learning) is only a tool and never a goal in itself. We have seen it is a perfect instrument to get a discussion going and encourage people to share ideas and information, but never as an instrument for comparison and norm-taking. The real bench-learning begins at the moment the details are available. Just as a report alone is only data, it’s the storytelling and the explanation of the differences that add the most value.
Benchmarks – a minimum criterion or a target goal?
As we have learned during our project, benchmarking should never be a goal in itself; learning and sharing are more important that just comparing figures. Also the lessons learnt have helped our participating IT professionals to build support for their ideas, budgets and plans in their own organisations. The journey has not come to an end, we’re only just beginning. And the first international co-operation will definitely be followed up in the near future.
Richard Troote is the head of ICT at Wales & West Housing and chair of the Community Housing Cymru IT Network. Henk Korevaar is the founder of F-fectis.
