• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Housing Technology logo

Housing Technology

Housing | IT | Telecoms | Business | Ecology

  • Free Subscription
  • Search Archive
  • Home
  • Research
  • Magazine
  • Events
  • Recruitment
  • Blog
  • On Demand
  • Contact
Home / Free Subscriber Access / Housing data… Essential and exciting
Housing data… Essential and exciting

Housing data… Essential and exciting

How many of our employees and residents have coronavirus or are shielding or isolating? Do we have enough tradespeople to carry out emergency repairs? How many development sites have had to close?

These were just a few of the questions that needed answers from Sovereign’s emergency response team at the start of the pandemic. We needed to provide answers and quickly, but where to start?

Sovereign owns and manages 60,000 homes and has 2,000 employees. Across our operations, we use around 50 different IT systems, not to mention countless spreadsheets. With that in mind, we had to find a way to bring data to the very forefront of maintaining ‘business as usual’ or at least as far as was humanly possible in a pandemic.

Reducing errors & manual interventions

We also knew that we needed to reduce our reliance on people, themselves operating in a time of crisis, having the energy and time to fill in Excel files. Instead, we identified where we could source data direct from our systems; removing manual interventions substantially reduces the risk of errors in the data. That said, there is a time and place for spreadsheets, such as when the data doesn’t already exist and you need a new source quickly, but more on that later.

We first had to decide which information was vital to our pandemic response. Once that was done, we needed a way to present that information in a single, easy-to-use location.

Fortunately, Sovereign always aspires to be a modern, connected business and we already had a strategy for a business-information platform in the pipeline.

Interactive dashboard

There was no time to wait for sign off; the pandemic had brought the need for a platform to centre stage. And so within just five weeks, working with Microsoft’s data warehousing and reporting systems, we pulled together an interactive dashboard for detailed operational reports.

The platform pulled data in from various systems, including Open HR, SDS Sequel and Active H, and then layered it so that we had a 360-degree, real-time view of what was going on. Our executive team and board could therefore make decisions based on what was actually happening right at that moment.

We tracked everything and focused on those activities that mattered most – repurposing trades where needed, speeding up our response to customer complaint hotspots and all the while monitoring the well-being of our people via logon profile data and putting steps in place to encourage healthy ways to work from home.

But, going back to the spreadsheets, what didn’t exist was how to monitor 146 individual processes across the business and how they were being affected by the pandemic.

Back to spreadsheets…

Good old Excel still had its place. A template spreadsheet allowed our heads of different service areas to record their current statuses and what they had planned for four weeks to come. This helped to ensure dependencies from supporting services would be in place to help the recovery of business as usual. Excel provided the source to a set of Power BI-based interactive reports.

The data we produced during the past year has absolutely shaped our response as a business, and the opportunity to trial the BI platform was a perfect proof-of-concept for rolling the platform out on a wider basis.

Meanwhile, our BI strategy was indeed signed off and now we are looking to an exciting future as our colleagues realise the potential of the platform we’ve produced.

More trackable data

Looking ahead, we’ll be able to use the platform for more and more because it’s not only people, homes, income or repairs data that we can track. For example, we also know that we’re responsible for 31,000 trees! And it doesn’t stop with internal data; there’s a wealth of external data that we’re tapping into as well, such as flood risk, crime, demographics and economic factors.

I want to help bring data alive and inspire Sovereign to see the numbers we crunch in a new way, not just as boring flat digits on a page. There’s a real story to be told and decisions to be influenced by how we use data in the future. I want to make things visual; I want everyone to see data in a new way, just as I do.

Audrey Lloyd is the data insights manager at Sovereign Housing.

See More On:

  • Housing Association: Sovereign Housing
  • Topic: Housing Management
  • Publication Date: 080 – March 2021
  • Type: Contributed Articles

Primary Sidebar

Most Recent Articles

  • Free cyber-defence tools from NCSC
  • Learning from history
  • Grand Union Housing gets connected with Aico HomeLink
  • The silences in the system: Predicting and preventing damp and mould
  • Looking back and to the future: Cyberthreats in social housing
  • Hyde signs repairs contract with Totalmobile
  • Fuelling high performance automation
  • Morgan Sindall’s Carbon Zero decarbonisation tool
  • An ethical approach to arrears
  • Housing and the ever-evolving workplace
  • Supporting residents with home safety risks
  • Less innovation & more service design at RHP
  • Ateb Group outsources IT help desks to Central Networks
  • Capital Letters partners with Evo Digital to tackle homelessness
  • Calico appoints M247 for digital transformation
  • 24/7 care requires 24/7 technology
  • Govtech trends for 2023
  • Are you ready for business process automation?
  • Lincoln council moves to the cloud with Civica
  • Why do IT business improvement projects fail?
  • Flagship and Ebrik launch augmented reality app
  • Following the golden thread
  • Setting the standard for carbon-monoxide protection
  • The business case for data
  • Digital twins – When, not if…
  • Using data to build communities
  • The cyber-security jigsaw’s missing piece – Managed detection & response
  • Cyber-security challenges in housing
  • Digitalising retrofits with SHDF & HomeLink
  • Tips for improving care and support

Footer

Housing Technology
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Contact
  • Free Subscription
  • Book an event
  • Blog
  • Search All Articles
  • Research
  • Update Your Subscription
  • Privacy Policy

Welcome to the housing Technology – Trusted Information For Business Professionals in HOusing

Housing Technology is the leading technology information service for the UK housing sector and local governments. We have always believed in the fundamental importance of how the UK’s social housing providers use technology to improve their tenants’ lives.

Subscribe to Housing Technology to gain market-leading research, unsurpassed peer networking opportunities and a greater understanding of your role to transform your business.

Copyright © The Intelligent Business Company 2022 | Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy
Housing Technology is published by the The Intelligent Business Company. A company with limited liability. Registered in England No. 4958057 | Vat Registion No. 833 0069 55.

Registered Business Address: Hoppingwood Farm, Robin Hood Way, London, SW20 0AB | Telephone: +44 (0) 20 8336 2293

htc23 pop banner