Tony Smith,that Housing IT Guy https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy @HousingITguy

Some thoughts on IT and UK SocialHousing from a unique perspective of over 25+ years working with over 100 RSL's, Councils and social landlord groups in the UK, Ireland & Australia. Also a healthy music knowledge music over the last 5 decades Available for independent housing RSL implementation, procurement of HMS, Repairs, CRM, EDM, DLO, Financial, Scheduling systems, critical friend etc. In Scotland I work with the folks at Arneil Johnston Check us out on Soundcloud /housingitguy

Monday, 18 November 2024

Exodus

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

“Leaving Babylon, Set The Captives Free”, sang Bob Marley.

Interesting today to notice the number of a particular software supplier to public sector and SocialHousing’s senior software staff on LinkedIn, now helpfully displaying a ‘#OpenToWork’ badge. Some folk I have worked with and many who have toiled in assorted roles, for that particular supplier for many years in some cases.

Its mainly Local Government product specialist staff from Civica I am spotting this week. Once you have come across a couple, its not a trickle but a tsunami. A proper exodus.

Justin Fisher, John Miller, Paul Berry, Liam Lindon, Peter Woodward, Clare Landshoft to name just a few. Some good people. At this rate, my old boss Richard Chambers (who I still owe a pint for assisting me ably once at Penrith Magistrates Court, with a spot of speeding! – sorry tricky), might be the last chap left standing. I hope for him he isn’t, however it can only be negative for future development of the Cx products, if most of the product design knowledge leaves the building in a hurry. The rush to get a recommendation sorted with Jeff Hewitt is justifiably on!

In November 2023, Blackstone announced its acquisition of Civica from Partners Group AG. The takeover was completed in May 2024. As with every merger and takeover (and there have been a few this year that the CMA are not raking over) I have ever seen, its always spun by the PR team as an ‘opportunity’ or ‘new era for growth’. A bit soon then just six months on, to be taking an impromptu haircut before Christmas.

What does this say about the housing products, is that maybe Cx Housing, Assets & Contractor development parked now? Is perhaps a brand new product planned? Why not get some hotshot games programmers in, using generative AI to cut code, save costs and write a brand new solution set? There might yet be some silver-lining here.....

Before that, I am sure from what some tell me in the sector, many sites will be still hoping their Cx implementations will still eventually get properly finished off first.

For sure, potentially some competitors, particularly ones winning big and delivering it too recently, will clearly benefit from this new talent source on the jobs marketplace. Failing that, they can join the growing band of ex-employee ‘specialists’, who earn good money shoring up implementations, once original project days are exhausted.

It is also coming up to Christmas and winter is one of the worst times to be redundant. I know, I’ve been there done that. If you have been made redundant at this time, take care and be sure to look after your mental health – its important and might save your life. Also remember, as one Glassdoor closes, quite often another one generally will magically open.

Struggling making your project (or supplier) deliver?

Get in touch, for a chat soon over a latte & some chocolate Hobnobs ☕

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

Bob Marley and The Wailers – Exodus.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.

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Friday, 8 November 2024

Under The Gun

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

Just when you thought it was safe to come out and look at new social housing & council software solutions, one of the biggest suppliers has found itself unexpectedly under the gun. You will have perhaps read here in this blog back in early July , about the sale of London-based outsourcing and professional services company Capita Software, to US Solon, Ohio headquartered MRI (now owners of Orchard & Castleton).

The CMA (Competition & Markets Authority) who have the job of discovering any companies enabling monopolies and restricting choice, this week 05/11/2024 issued an Initial Enforcement Order against MRI. For legal eagles out there, it’s under section 72 of the Enterprise Act 2002. The LSE update is here on the latest for this £207m software takeover. Back following the July announcement there was an early 18% surge in Capita shares to just over 18p each.

The most recent parallel to this affecting UK Socialhousing and Local Authority solutions, was a few years back again involving Capita’s merger with IBS. That took many months and involved having to farm off benefits applications.

In this case, the least optimum outcome for MRI could be a decision to have to hive off the OneHousing applications and MRI retain the remaining non-housing sector solutions. The latter includes education and other areas non-key to Real Estate, MRI’s specialism. However it would keep more traditional HMS options available for procurement in the medium to large providers zone.

Of course there are plenty of housing system options beyond the traditional HMS, particularly suitable in the crowded micro to medium sized provider zone. These include written specifically for Cloud/Responsive Browser offerings, would-be dinosaur slayers, D365, client-server options hiding behind thin clients and Salesforce.Org options.

Notably MRI seem to currently have a gap in that lower sector segment. Methinks we might yet possibly see another acquisition being needed before long.

Checkout the full CMS chapter & verse here with lots of legalese. As at time of writing, no word of this on MRI's official UK news page.

Struggling with changing to a modern Cloud HMS all in a responsive browser?

Get in touch , for a chat soon over a brew & I will bring the quality biccies ☕

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The Black Keys – Under The Gun.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Sunday, 27 October 2024

How would Fad had secured his Smart Gadgets?

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

I was in a conversation just last week with a SocialHousing client I am working with, around IOT trials, security concerns and potential resident resistance. A couple of the organisations I am working with are putting a toe in the water with Switchee and navigating the technical and cultural challenges.

Although more and more smart devices are starting to be invited into our cribs, for sure there are still lots of rumour, fears and conspiracies around landlords providing them. Many fears are not justified and clearly for me, benefits always need to be used to sell/justify tenants trusting these devices to improve their environments or save them money.

Malware and threats like the Mirai botnet are indeed real and need to be considered as a risk in our own & customers homes.

So, how best to get the basics of IOT & smart gadget security right?

Start with decent complex passwords. Always on device accounts use a mix of lower/uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols.

Switch on all digital safeguards, such as MFA (two-factor authentication) wherever available and practical.

Cut out the use of features you don’t need, such as Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), to lower the risks on and across devices.

Provide a decent isolated guest network. Have separate networks for visitors, keeping IoT devices safe from other mobile devices.

Keep on top of periodic software updates. Updates improve smart devices fixing security issues. Where automatic updates are available, be sure to switch these on.

Choose to configure with the securest network protocols and guard the network against cyber attack.

Use strong encryption, like WPA2, making it harder for intruders.

If you have smart devices at home, or IOT installations in SocialHousing or other property, monitoring environment, being used within care and support or other areas, is your team applying all of the above. Having these habits in place and sharing these with customers will reassure and perhaps allow them greater confidence to see the wider benefits.

For sure, IOT has been ‘just around the corner’ for more than 5 years. Maybe if we can properly address the ‘is that secure’ question, we will be much closer to that reality.

Struggling with Asset Management information or incorporating IOT?

Get in touch , for a chat soon over a cuppa ☕😋

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Cornershop -'Lessons Learn't From Rocky I To Rocky III'

Fad Gadget – The Box' .
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Saturday, 5 October 2024

(Procurement) Lessons to be learned

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

I have mused on this blog about where the next changes to UK public procurement rules might come from, particularly post Brexit. The last revision to the regulations were via EU law nearly 10 years ago, with the ‘Public Contracts Regulations 2015’.

Well at last the Westminster ‘Procurement Act 2023’ although later than the Oct 28th release expected, is almost upon us and planned to come into force in Feb 2025. The legislation aims to ‘simplify and improve’ the UK's public procurement processes. This includes Housing associations, Councils and Socialhousing providers, among others, such as big spenders like Network Rail. Over £300 billion is spent annually, so its not small beer.

As can be expected, this bill originating from the Sunak Tory administration paints this as, "throwing complicated and bureaucratic EU rules into the bin and stripping back red tape". To be honest I never found OJEU troublesome and actually a single place for potential Suppliers to research opportunities, was no bad thing.

The act is designed to:

1)    Improve value for money: Reduce costs for the public sector and businesses
2)    Increase transparency: Allow taxpayers to scrutinize how their money is spent
3)    Open up opportunities: Allow new entrants, such as small businesses and social enterprises, to compete for public contracts
4)    Create a more flexible commercial system: Meet the country's needs while remaining compliant with international obligations

So, how is it attempting to achieve the above?

1)    Centralized platforms - Pipeline and tender notices for opportunities over certain thresholds will be published on centralized platforms
2)    New shiny ‘Contracts Finder’ - Buyers will be required to publish notices to Contracts Finder when a contract is modified or terminated
3)    KPI reporting - KPIs for contracts over £5m will be measured and reported on in the public domain
4)    Assessment summaries - Suppliers who submit an assessed tender will receive an assessment summary explaining why their tender was successful or unsuccessful
5)    Digital platform - Suppliers will be able to register and store their details on a central digital platform

To support greater transparency, much more reporting (particularly £5m contracts and above), will be necessary from Contracting Bodies. A few other tweaks such as swapping MEAT (Most Economically Advantageous Tender), with MAT (Most Advantageous Tender), should provide greater reassurance to contracting authorities that they can take a broader view of what can be included in the evaluation of tenders. Not actually a massive change as we could already prioritise quality over price if needed. We still in procurements need to ask the right questions to properly evaluate quality better, in order to not just waste higher levels of public money.

The Act introduces new terminology for excluded and exclude-able suppliers and introduces a central debarment list on which a UK Government Minister may record the names of excluded or excludable suppliers. This attempts to tackle anti-competitive agreements and cartel activity.

Commitments under international treaties, such as the WTO ‘Agreement on Government Procurement’ have reduced some level of the simplification that can be applied.

Once we have been working under the new regime for a year or so, I should come back share some opinions. In the meantime, if you or your procurement bods need to bone up on the new changes, all the learning module lessons can be found here.

Help with your procurement?

Get in touch , for a chat soon over a cuppa and a biscuit or two ☕😋

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Cornershop - 'Lessons Learn't From Rocky I To Rocky III' .
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Saturday, 21 September 2024

Aint No Room

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

I have come across BIM / Building Information Modelling in many recent projects. Mostly in London based providers who are developing, however these are also innovations that can be leveraged in more historic and traditional situations and environments, 3D design and visualisation. Its clear to me that standards are being defined. The Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) non-proprietary data format, looks like the early leader. Hopefully this is the VHS survivor, not the innovative Betamax format, back in 1990’s we all wished had won!

Providers, consultants and professionals I have worked with in Development, are all excited at the way standard formats like COBie, can smooth collaboration throughout the build. Post handover, contractors and Socialhousing staff can also use this data to take better informed decisions going forward.

In terms of the direction of the individual UK social housing regulators, providers having better information on the location of all fitted features, with ability to share more info with residents and manage our assets better is where we are going.

BIM is good and its clearly going to be a strand of how we will better manage assets in the future, hopefully recording and identifying components mapped to three axis and easily represented visually. The potential is there to improve the performance of our assets and how they use (or lose) energy well. Successful mapping of data points, hopefully in the thousands not hundreds in our buildings can provide a vast amount of information, which can be manipulated and overlaid with other data, perhaps collated via IOT sensors.

For all the excitement of virtual modelling and having all this information to hand, its interesting how many building organisations, still have limited Asset Management solution capability, or it is siloed and looked after by two men and a dog, who fiercely gatekeep access to it. Worse of all there are still too many organisations stuck with data in Keystone, hampered by Silverlight vulnerabilities, now further isolated from the main network by ICT, for security reasons. Asset data is better integrated into wider solutions, such as CRM, Repairs, Compliance, Voids and for general use of the housing team. While BIM might be aware of an M&E installation for ventilation, does the servicing team realise that the filters should be checked & cleaned annually to keep the kit working well?

So, if considering getting started with BIM, ensure you consider it as part of your wider Asset Management data regime. Thinking about it as a whole, the #Socialhousing sector will potentially be in a better position to improve the lives of our tenants, shared/leaseholders and satisfy those evolving regulator demands, from whatever corner of the UK, we need to conform to.

Are you getting best use of your Asset Management information?

Get in touch , for a chat soon over a cuppa and a biscuit or two ☕😋

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The Vines – Ain’t No Room.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Monday, 9 September 2024

Are We With The Co-Pilots ?

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

I don’t know about you, but are you finding AI is falling a bit short of what you expected? It is a little for me to be honest.

In the 70’s and 80’s I am sure we were promised moon beans served by cyborg chefs & robot butlers and all this intelligence was going to handle a lot of our mundane hassles. You know, the ironing and boring rubbish like that. Unfortunately, most of it seems focused more on deskilling & taking away creative jobs, painters, photographers and journalists. We are still ironing and will be doing so, for long into the near future I am sure, while the internet is clogged up with AI creations, this is less good all round. In fact future AI trained on other source AI generated content can only degrade the concept.

Copilot as you are probably aware, is being plugged as the Microsoft lead AI product and a great money spinner at £24.70, per user per month. The annual cost exceeds many per seat costs for M365. In fact pretty much any demo of D365 etc will feature a mention of Copilot multiple times. In terms of socialhousing applications built into D365, multiple sales folk will mention it in demos, although concrete use cases are actually pretty thin on the ground. Its always ‘coming soon’ apparently. So don’t waste your time getting too excited there. On more than one D365 demo I have had the response, “Best not to try to use it here as yet!”.

AI including others such as ChatGPT for sure is capable of providing 80%+ of the help, but currently still needs that last 20% of human sense check. Otherwise we can look like fools. Productivity can be improved, but only if you can crack decent accuracy. All the Microsoft stack has AI capability, i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. In Word for example, Copilot will not knockout much in the way of meaningful new organisation policies, but could give you some great pointers to what might be right or wrong with what’s there.

AI to summarise emails or documents can help you determine some of the wood from the trees and potentially get you 80% to where you need to be. While AI can determine the ‘tone’ of a dialog, this may be not much better than the experience of a staff member with a couple of years working on the job. ‘Soft Skills’ are a human trait and certainly will remain so.

AI Translation while useful is nothing particularly new. Google Translate has been translating over 50 languages for ages.

What about Copilot in Excel and PowerBI reporting? Well here’s some opportunities. It can have a go at building queries for you, although with limits when cross-joins or complex imaginative extracts are needed. Again, ability of a skilled staff member to take the grunt work as a starting point, will save time.

In Outlook bog standard rules can be enhanced for sure, however I would always value an experienced staff member over just going with AI. While you can use AI to organise your Inbox, where is the fun in that eh?

My favourite use of AI by far currently and something I would recommend to all however applies to Teams. I am sure you do battle with the Teams frustrations daily, however the most useful features are AI transcription and summarisations. Ideal for easily documenting supplier demos/remote meetings, quickly finding specific terms and conversations etc. An unexpected bonus of the Covid years and the shift to more hybrid demonstrations (shunned & exotic prior to Covid), which would have felt strange or lacking reverence previously.

If you are considering dipping a toe into Microsoft AI, just give it a look with a single user and put it completely through its paces. If you can see ROI, then crack on. If you cannot at this time justify it, maybe come back later. Across 12 months AI is bound to leap forward and improve, maybe come back and review it then.

AI can help you, but don’t assume it’s your silver bullet (as yet). If you are getting any additional practical and accurate uses out of Microsoft Copilot or other AI for UKhousing, please be in touch.

Are your Social Housing ICT solutions doing a good job to support you?

Reach out just get in touch , for a chat any time over a drink and some Ginger Nuts ☕😋

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Ladytron – I’m with the Pilots.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here