This issue has a strong focus on the subject of big data (see the feature on page), but as the article mentions, big data should really be seen as part of the bigger picture around digital convergence.
If you haven’t come across the acronym SMAC yet, you certainly will soon. SMAC covers social, mobile, analytics and cloud and is at the centre of many companies’ move towards consolidating and unifying all of their digital channels, with the goal of gaining insights into business performance, customer behaviours, supplier metrics and so on, that were previously fragmented across different systems.
The key aspect to SMAC isn’t just the aggregation of all of your disparate data sources, it’s also then having the right analytics tools to then find patterns and trends that would otherwise be impossible to spot.
This is all heady stuff for many housing providers that may have only just introduced mobile working, dynamic scheduling or self-service portals, but for housing providers wanting to leapfrog to the next level of IT and business integration, SMAC is a good place to start.
Compared with most housing providers’ standalone applications, such as housing, finance and asset management, SMAC enables you to reinvent existing processes to remove complexity and discover new efficiencies, improve performance with data-driven insights for quantitative decision-making, and add speed and flexibility to anticipate market trends.
So perhaps now’s the time to SMAC your IT up?
