Weeknotes: Making Sense of Data
Social Purpose
My social purpose has been stretched like elastic over the past few weeks with lots of circle of life activity. Last week I tried to give you at least a fun summary of my work, rest and play.
Now, I want to catch up on the last month, which has been all about data and the campaign for a National Database of Social Homes. This is all linked in some way to:
- Some takeaways from the Housing Technology Conference.
- What we’re beginning to understand about Consumer Regulation and what it will mean for us all, especially in digital and data
- the Data Challenges in Social Housing report
I’m trying to stitch together the important stuff and make sense of it and where we are heading. So here goes…
Business Need
Last week, I attended the Housing Technology Conference at the East Midlands Conference Centre. There were three persistent themes: collaboration, data, and artificial intelligence.
There were two well-thought-out presentations from larger housing associations about their organisations’ journeys to curate data.
Everyone needs a data strategy, and both presentations I saw from Orbit and Riverside demonstrated the forethought that needs to go into such strategies. There were engaging slides on “data principles” and a “data roadmap”. The sector is good at this sort of thing, demonstrating how we will organise and set up an infrastructure or framework that allows us to envisage efficient data management. We show how data is accessible yet secure, with protocols to keep information relevant and up-to-date.
As artificial intelligence emerges, we are also forced to consider the ethics and diversity needs of what data to collect and use. This includes informed consent, data anonymity, and whether sensors are invasive to our privacy.
We’ve called this Data Governance because we love discussing governance and risk management in the social housing sector. There will be thousands of words expended in board reports on data, which will focus on governance.
Data Analytics
The discussion and debate on new consumer regulation at forums and webinars rightly highlights the need for high-quality data about properties. As experts in technology and data have pointed out, such information currently resides in varoius locations, extending beyond recognised systems, software applications, and spreadsheets. It’s going to be tricky to bring it all together.
Data governance provides us with a strategy to manage this information, but the question remains: do you possess the skills and capabilities to delve “under the bonnet” and understand what is causing the warning lights on your dashboard? While larger housing associations may have the capacity, it may prove more challenging for smaller ones to identify patterns within the data related to housing quality, resident satisfaction, or other factors.
Executives might find themselves sidetracked by technical and financial decisions concerning the various methods to transform, clean, and categorise data, and how to store it in data lakes, data marts, and data warehouses within hyperscale storage facilities like Amazon Web Services and Azure.
And then, the issue of format arises. While executives may seek summaries and trends, operational managers require details on exceptions and predictions, and then the ability to apply these insights to real-life people issues. Let’s not get started on colour schemes…
From data governance to data literacy is a quite a leap.
Digital Insights
One way or another, the sector will be compelled to embrace their data literacy and competence. Our skills, capacity, and capabilities will improve. We will begin to tackle the Data Challenges in Social Housing as concisely reported by Dr. Simon Williams of Service Insights.
Having reached this stage, regulation should become more straightforward, and comparative benchmarking between housing associations will be facilitated. It will help us recognise which data is crucial for various stakeholders, from housing managers to government officials, and how it can support decision-making.
Making the data transparent and accessible to residents will help restore trust in our purpose and intent.
If that’s where we get to, that’s great.
However, there is much more we could accomplish, such as sharing data across different domains, including maintenance, net zero, community services, and policy research, to assess its impact and identify opportunities for further data enhancement.
And whilst monetisation might not be the primary focus in social housing, understanding the value of data in terms of cost savings, efficiency improvements, and funding opportunities is critical.
We can then rightly claim to be data driven!
