Raven Housing Trust was Highly Commended in the IT Team of the Year category at the Housing Technology Awards 2025. Mark Baker, Raven Housing’s director of resources and deputy chief executive, explains how its Modern Workplace project has further enabled the housing provider to become a digitally-enabled business of the future within just 12 months.
Raven Housing has proactively embraced a new digital culture, thanks to our award-winning Better Connected digital transformation programme. More recently, we have really ramped up our efforts by implementing our Modern Workplace project. This has single-handedly accelerated our digital journey and unlocked a wealth of organisation-wide benefits in the process.
The challenge
While digital transformation is starting to make its mark in social housing, the sector still lags behind the corporate world’s technological curve.
Our IT team has made sure that we’re leading the way in embracing innovation to transform the way we do things and ultimately improve the experience of our colleagues and customers.
The work involved with delivering our Modern Workplace project has been extensive. Our four-strong IT team has overhauled our back-office IT infrastructure. They have leveraged the cloud to create a truly modern workplace that is flexible and efficient, and created a secure culture that empowers colleagues to work in ways that works best for them and meets our business objectives.
Our IT team continuously went well ‘above and beyond’ to make the required changes, which also saw them tackling numerous daily challenges associated with deploying our new systems and processes as smoothly as possible.
Technical practicalities aside, the team played a key role in making sure colleagues across the entire organisation were fully on board with the changes.
Our solution
All of our supporting back-office technology has been moved to a modern, cloud-based platform. We have implemented full use of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to enable collaboration and promote a ‘work from anywhere’ culture for all of our colleagues across the UK.
We have decommissioned our on-premises legacy architecture, including application servers, a Microsoft SQL Server database management system and our Citrix platform. This has streamlined our servers from 49 to just three traditional Active Directory (AD) servers in a privately-hosted virtual datacentre. The AD servers have been migrated to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and the decommissioning of the domain is due for completion this summer.
Our Modern Workplace project set out to finish what Better Connected started, with the transition of our four core systems to a ‘software as a service’ model by migrating all of our remaining services and apps to Azure.
Our IT team adopted a new Change Governance Framework and is using DevOps and GitHub to manage and control our software changes, increasing the efficiency, speed, agility and security of development and delivery across the entire business.
We’ve removed a significant amount of legacy network infrastructure, upgraded our switches and APs and reduced the complexity of our network topography. The next steps are to upgrade our firewall devices in our head office and scheme sites to provide a single ‘front door’ for ease of management and a simpler network for our IT team to run.
We have considerably improved our cyber-security by adopting the Centre for Internet Security’s 18 critical security controls and have achieved the Cyber Essentials Plus certification.
Our mobile devices have been upgraded as well, providing colleagues with more up-to-date smartphones and tablets, all remotely and securely managed through our new mobile device management (MDM) system. We have moved network provider to ensure flexibility of carrier and negotiated a significant reduction in contract cost over three years.
We are also offering next-day laptop replacements and/or repair (remote and at the office) for colleagues via a leasing arrangement with our suppliers. And we have reduced our IT team’s manual workload by leveraging Windows Autopilot to automate the provisioning of company laptops.
All of our head-office’s desktop kit has been upgraded too, alongside Dell USB-C monitors and Microsoft Teams Rooms video-conferencing devices in our large meeting rooms.
Business impact
Our Modern Workplace project has delivered huge financial and cyber-security benefits. It has built increased resilience into our business, making us better equipped to cope with future challenges. At the same time, the changes we’ve made have streamlined and automated many of our processes, enabling our business to run more efficiently from both a cost and operational perspective.
The direct cost-savings achieved from the project include:
- £350,000 in infrastructure (datacentre) costs;
- £79,000 by decommissioning legacy applications;
- £91,000 in licensing costs by migrating to a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, incl. not-for-profit discounts;
- £14,000 in annual printing costs via our new fleet of full-cloud printers.
Decommissioning our legacy systems, including our old, air-conditioned server room, has reduced our running costs and the time spent by our IT staff managing physical hardware.
The IT team has regularly gone the extra mile to develop solutions that speed up routine processes. For example, they used Azure to improve the system for generating finance asset reports, with reports now available on demand rather than overnight.
As well as maximising our efficiency and saving resources, the Modern Workplace project has improved collaboration across our entire organisation. This, alongside our hybrid working model, is extremely valuable for our business and supports our ability to recruit and retain people based on skills, experience and talent rather than their geographical location.
Future plans
Our IT team has made an outstanding contribution to the business within just 12 months, delivering significant improvements to our security and operational effectiveness (and thereby directly benefiting our customers) and generating valuable savings in our running costs for IT support and licensing.
This all means that we can spend more on innovation, future systems’ development and cloud security for the ongoing benefit of both our colleagues and our customers.
Mark Baker is the director of resources and deputy chief executive of Raven Housing Trust. The housing provider was Highly Commended in the IT Team of the Year category at the Housing Technology Awards 2025.
