Watford Community Housing undertook a strategic decision to bring its IT services back in-house in April 2018. This presentation focuses on the journey taken to deliver core infrastructure resilience, increase software development and build a robust support service that has prepared the organisation for the next steps in its digital journey while ensuring commercial and regulatory compliance for the organisation.

Speakers: Barry Wilson (CTO) & Paul Richmond (group director of finances and resources)

Following Wandle’s presentation at the 2019 conference, Wandle continues on its mission to deliver the ‘wow’ factor to its customers, providing that all-encompassing customer experience, including tackling the beast that is repairs.

Following 25 workshops, 11 process maps, 19 training sessions and a fair bit of help from our friends, we went live with Microsoft Dynamics for our repairs function in November 2019. We want to share our experience (including the “tricky bits”) so if you are thinking about following a similar route, this session is definitely for you!

P.S. Wandle is also developing a new customer portal which is co-designed with its customers…

Speaker: Debbie Chun (IT programme manager)

Technology is enabling us to do more in our working day; resilient and responsive tools, automating processes and gaining business intelligence. However, when building the business case and budgeting for the investment, the integration costs with the existing environment must be factored in. We’ll look at some cases from the housing and non-housing sectors – highlighting how to mitigate pitfalls when implementing new technologies such as Office365 and getting the best from your investment.

Speakers: Jenny Shorter (senior Consultant) & Andy Fairey (technical director)

We are going to be talking about business intelligence, data management, IoT, AI, cognitive learning, predictive analytics and how building our connected data landscape using the right technology platforms has been essential to deliver our future plans and visions as a data-driven decision-making organisation. Although that’s a short line, it’s a huge piece of work involving many different enablers. If data is key to your organisation and you want to achieve one version of the truth to become a data driven decision making organisation, using business intelligence to shape your business investments and drive services you deliver, come and hear our story.

Speaker: Craig Round (business analyst)

The first 90 days of a new role are critical. This presentation will focus on how a new group head of technology change defined the current state of a leading housing provider, designed the vision for technology change and the blueprint that will enable it, and compiled potential near-term innovation opportunities to support a modern workplace and the customer experience.

Speaker: Neill Crump (group head of technology change)

The focus of this presentation is predominantly how Power Platform applications can be used to ease property management business processes, particularly with respect to ensuring the safety of tenants and properties. We will showcase how Power Apps and Power Automate (formerly Flow) integrate with each other to provide a truly integrated solution that addresses fire safety, health and safety of people and places.

Speaker: Jamie Barker (senior solution architect)