Housing Technology returned for the tenth consecutive year to the incredible BT Tower in central London at the beginning of September to host ‘Connected Communities 2019’, with the generous support of Aareon, BT, Castleton Technology and Itica.
With its core themes of ‘analyse, predict & inform’, the background to the event was how housing providers can streamline their internal operations and tenant engagement through innovations in self-service, CRM, data management, process automation, AI, analytics and business intelligence.
The event opened with BT’s legendary breakfast followed by a quick-fire series of talks from Aareon, BT (including one of their famed ‘futurologists’), Itica and Wales & West Housing. After a very good lunch in the slowly revolving restaurant at the top of the BT Tower, with views over the whole of London, the afternoon presentations featured excellent talks from Castleton Technology, Connect Housing, Housing Solutions and Sovereign Housing.
Key points & common themes
The nine presentations covered a very wide area, but for the 90 guests, the key points and common themes were to move fast and nimbly with new projects (with a frequent emphasis on minimum viable products), embrace CCS frameworks (usually cheaper and faster), concentrate on getting your underlying data accurate and consistent (particularly for digital transformation), create project teams comprising diverse staff (for more innovation and better results), and examine the culture of how, when and where your staff want to work (millennials really do have the same aspirations and expectations as older generations).
