Increasing external pressures on the housing sector, including TSMs, a greater focus on compliance and a drive towards personalised services, often lead to new technology and data initiatives. Platform Housing’s director of EPMO Tamara Fyffe and head of data, analytics and AI Richard Hawkes discuss their conflicting and complementary opinions on whether you should build or buy solutions.
Build or buy – what’s your preference?
Tamara Fyffe: It depends on the need. Colleagues and customers need to see what technology can do because it’s often hard for them to articulate what they need beyond their knowledge of existing processes, systems or pain points.
Market research is a really useful tool to inform and influence requirements or to see if we can actually build something ourselves. Some questions to ask include: how unique are our processes; are other housing providers building or buying; and what are the outcomes for those who decide to build their own solutions versus those who don’t?
I firmly believe that unless there is a pressing reason to have something custom made, there will be a solution that already exists. However, some words of warning – don’t forget the licensing, training, upgrade, storage and support costs.
Richard Hawkes: In a sector where we spend so much money on providing safe homes for our customers, I believe we shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel. Instead, we should be combining commercial off the shelf products (COTS) with home-grown solutions if the functionality doesn’t exist or doesn’t meet the business needs.
The true cost of product teams and developers, maintainability and the speed to execute a solution needs to be finely balanced against the ease of procuring solutions and the ability to execute a strategic vision.
Which approach creates the best experience for colleagues and customers?
Richard: At face value, personalised, organisation-specific products, built to enable the detailed nuances of business processes and customer journeys, naturally lean towards building and tailoring solutions in-house. However, there are some great COTS products available which can help achieve this, with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and/or a faster pace of execution.
In housing, this can typically look like best-of-breed solutions surrounding a housing management system and/or a CRM platform such as Salesforce or Dynamics. When choosing an approach, it’s important to have a clear strategy around integration, middleware and data lineage, as well as a strong relationship with strategically important suppliers. Systems really do need to seamlessly integrate and suppliers need to help you make the most of any investment.
Tamara: I’d always advocate letting colleagues and, where possible, customers be involved in selecting the technology they’ll be using. If it’s a long-term strategic solution that will cut across multiple departments, there are definitely benefits to having an in-house team that has built the solution or who can at least support and improve it; ‘being a master of your own destiny’ is the often-used phrase.
However, you’re then competing with big technology companies to retain your staff, and that’s certainly something to bear in mind when considering workforce planning. I think the bigger solutions that have been around in the housing sector for a long time are always worth considering.
My advice is to try not to customise out-of-the-box solutions too much because it can result in the supplier not being able to support those customisations. If you truly need custom, then build it. Ultimately, both approaches can provide excellent experiences as long as the right people are engaged throughout the change.
What is the most cost-effective approach?
Tamara: In-house build is generally seen as the most cost effective but that’s often because people’s time isn’t factored into the cost of the project. When you add up the costs of development, quality assurance, testing, deployment, regression and support, you’d probably find similar costs to buying a solution and supporting it.
My advice is to make sure post-implementation costs are considered and ask yourself how the solution will be improved, maintained and managed. Both approaches have costs and some routes are quicker than others; procurement processes can take time for both you and the supplier bidding for the business.
Richard: I agree – it’s all about the true, holistic cost of ownership, including people, licensing and upgrades. These costs are true for either COTS or self-built solutions, and while you don’t need your own product teams for the solutions you buy, you often end up paying for it in consumption, professional services and licensing.
A lot of this comes down to the financial capacity and risk profile for supporting the ongoing development of solutions in the longer term. It’s right to ask difficult questions when choosing an approach: what about if suppliers increase their costs; what happens when market influences inflate salaries to the point of creating the attrition of key individuals; how quickly can you move to support new legislation?
What are the biggest wins you’ve seen from build vs. buy?
Richard: Back in 2020, the pandemic and the rush to home-based working led to many solutions being developed at pace. We witnessed an integrated risk management system being developed on the Microsoft Power Platform within a matter of weeks. Not only did this enable colleagues to work in an agile manner with information at their fingertips, it also ensured that work was tracked at every stage, meaning our customers were never forgotten.
Conversely, we see the value of a reliable housing management system taking away everyday activities, allowing colleagues to focus on value-adding work and spending more time with customers.
Any stand-out moments for you?
Tamara: Our in-house developer recently built a tool that supported our income team to process DWP queries in relation to customer benefits. The developer worked directly with the team and using robotic process automation, built a tool that continues to save hours in admin time. This is the perfect example of build it!
Tamara Fyffe is the director of EPMO (enterprise project management office) and Richard Hawkes is head of data, analytics and AI at Platform Housing Group.
