The common thread through almost every story in Housing Technology and every housing provider’s technology and business goals (or problems) is that of disconnected, inconsistent, disparate or just plain bad (pick your adjective) data.
Shared data standards (c.f. our recent ‘Data Standards in Social Housing 2025’ report, available now from housing-technology.com/research) are now a viable solution to this problem. If they are applied as early as possible to ‘upstream’ data sources, data standards are the catalyst to remove the most frequent problems associated with siloed data sources. The ‘standardised’ data from all of those upstream sources can then be surfaced, internally and externally, for myriad purposes (incl. contractors’ data flows and regulatory reporting).
End-to-end processing
Straight-through processing extends this idea further. As far back as 2008, Housing Technology has espoused straight-through processing (STP) in social housing – this is the concept of automated, end-to-end transaction processing without manual intervention. For example, a tenant’s repair request can pass seamlessly to all relevant parts of a housing provider (and its contractors) without the need for re-keying data or manual interventions.
The benefits of STP accrue exponentially as more applications can talk to each other (which is where data standards come in), although there will naturally be ‘outliers’ where the time and resources needed to bring them into the STP fold outweigh the advantages of doing so.
Data differences
Aside from the cultural implications and issues around STP, one of the principal barriers to STP concerns data fields, formats and semantics (et al) differing between applications.
However, the technologies necessary to achieve STP (i.e. middleware, open APIs, web services & integration tools) are widely available, as are data standards from HACT, the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government and Open Data Exchange (ODX).
Bite-sized approach
Housing providers can start by looking at their IT estates in conjunction with their business processes to assess where STP and data standards can deliver the greatest benefit, beginning with a bite-sized approach that focuses on linking just a few applications at first, based on common data standards, before joining up the dot across the rest of the organisation.
