Housing Technology’s second successful Data Matters one-day event took place at The British Museum in central London earlier this month. Kindly sponsored by 3C Consultants, Aareon, IntoZetta, Social Telecoms and Switchee, Data Matters attracted a packed audience of over 120 data specialists from housing providers, with the event completely sold out beforehand.
With 11 presentations during the one-day agenda alongside peer-to-peer networking and lunch among the sponsors’ technology showcases, Data Matters 2023 was certainly busy and gave the guests a lot to think about. To summarise the speakers’ views on data management in housing:
- Data must be considered a strategic asset, on a par with tenants and properties;
- ‘Dirty data’ contaminates everything it touches;
- Data management needs to be ingrained into housing providers’ organisational fabric, from top to bottom;
- ‘Dark data’ (spreadsheets, ‘shadow IT’, etc) can best be described as a ‘known unknown’ and must be brought into the light.
Riverside Housing (Chris Nove) opened the event with a talk on the importance of creating a data-ownership culture, followed by 3C Consultants (Nick Hawkins) and Your Homes Newcastle (Rachel Taylor) on the need to focus on data quality and turning off the ‘dirty data tap’, then Southern Housing (Amramanjari Singh) covered how it’s concentrating on building data confidence to provide better customer service.
Aareon (Alek Legosteva) explained how housing providers need to use data to accelerate their tenant-facing activities, with Stonewater (Paul Blaydes) then illustrating its use of Azure for highly-advanced, dynamic data management, followed by a joint talk by Social Telecoms (Rob Mottram) and 8×8 (Jordan Marshall) on data management in omni-channel environments.
After an excellent lunch, Halton Housing (Paul Croston) emphasised the need for transparent data practices and strong data governance, followed by a panel discussion from IntoZetta, with Sanctuary Housing (Priyanka Kakkar) and Platform Housing (Rob Fletcher), on its ‘Data in Housing 2023’ survey, then Sovini Group (Steve Monks) covered data literacy and ‘real world’ reporting.
The final sessions saw Switchee (Ben Morris) demonstrate how IoT-based data can unlock surprising insights, and Trident Housing & Tuntum Housing (Nick Murphy) closed the event with first-hand advice about how to get board-level support for data management programmes.
We are already making preliminary plans for Data Matters 2024 next September (date and location tbc); please email datamatters@housing-technology.com if you’d like to be alerted to speaking opportunities and sponsorship options.
