In the early ‘noughties’, I ran a seminar for ‘constructing excellence’ on ‘safety by design’, followed a few years later by one on ‘designing out waste’. The purpose in mentioning them is to emphasise the fact that, despite new products and new and updated regulations, such as those dealing with high-speed electronic communications networks, the…
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Contributed Articles
Budget time – Are you spending wisely?
As organisations across the country approach the end of another financial year, all eyes are on budgets. Assessing spending over the last year and crunching the numbers for the year ahead is the name of the game right now. For housing providers, sensitivity to cost is crucial and it always has been. We know from…
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Looking beyond housing for IT procurement
Housing providers need to adopt a more commercial approach to IT procurement and a proven approach to IT implementation that is commonplace in many other sectors, according to Rob Bryan, operations director and transformation specialist at Vantage Business Solutions. My experience of procurement in other sectors is that an approach of ‘outputs first’ must be…
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Housing Technology – A 10-year story
This is a slightly-abridged version of a blog-post written by Tony Smith, an independent housing IT consultant at Acutance Consulting, on his ‘Tony Smith: That Housing IT Guy’ blog (tonysmiththathousingitguy.blogspot.co.uk), following the Housing Technology 2017 conference in March. I remember in my days at MIS-AMS, at an NHF IT Conference at Olympia (remember those?), a…
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The gamification of slips, trips and falls
New Charter Group, the University of Manchester (Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Alliance Manchester Business School and Division of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work) and Reason Digital have been collaborating on an innovative approach to the growing problem of slips, trips and falls among older people, and how digital interventions can help. The first digital…
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Transforming local communities through social media
In times of economic uncertainty, overpopulation and Brexit, the housing sector is under increasing pressure to provide high quality and affordable accommodation as quickly as possible. Only last month, the UK government announced its ambitious plans to build the homes that Britain needs. In this current climate, it’s more important than ever for housing associations…
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