I am the greatest

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Is your IT team ‘the greatest’ and do you give maximum satisfaction for expenditure per user? What price satisfaction then?

These are some of the things that the annual ‘HouseMark Information, Technology and Communication Benchmarking’ report aims to find out, by taking into account 144 housing organisations.

A little slimmer than previous years, the report suggests that RSL’s spend between £4K-6K on each ICT user, where LSVT’s appeared to mostly spend less. Notoriously, I have always wondered how accurate figures were, as I knew of organisations that deliberately submitted lower costs and others submitted very accurate figures and not surprisingly appeared in the lower quartile (higher cost section) of results.

One surprising conclusion is that costs did not seem to correlate to perceived satisfaction. Spending more on ITC does not appear to guarantee a better user experience or a more reliable system. I am unsure if many finance directors and managers will appreciate that outcome, as general up-time appears to be between 97-100%.

It would have been very useful to compare ICT costs across the six main housing management systems. This is not possible in this year’s report, but might well reflect where they have been used to create staff efficiencies.

A question I have been asked many times over the years, is “How many ICT staff do you think we should have?”. I am pleased to say that my usual finger in the air guess of one FTE (Full Time equivalent) post per 1,000 homes, is still a pretty good baseline. How does that compare for your team? IT staff remain stubbornly expensive at an average of over £41K, with ITC salaries in Yorkshire over £4K higher than in the North West of England. Maybe gods own county is not so frugal after all. 

Consolidation is often thought to reduce IT costs, this report suggests that smaller (perfectly formed) RSLs of under 5,000 homes appeared to perform better and cheaper on average. Of course the provision of many remote offices can push up costs.

Another interesting fact is that having a DLO appears to reduce ICT average costs, as well as saving your organisation 20% on your VATtable repairs.

The report highlights the current  ‘Digital by Default’ agenda as a driver for more web based resident portals and a drive to self service. From what I have seen recently, the drive to move Universal Credit and other current benefits online, is assisting take up of this type of channel shifting. As can be imagined, this reduces the cost of an enquiry or transaction from around £10, down to a mere fraction of that, providing enough customers move to use web portals.

It’s my view that tenants and customers still need a number of reasons to go to the HMS portals provided. This might well point to better integration with social media, local twitter feeds/Facebook/Google+ pages etc, to entice people in. Discount/reward schemes may also be a way to bring people in. A few RSLs to my knowledge have used social media very well in emergency situations, extreme weather, crime, lost children etc.

To help get residents on-line, a trend was identified to move old hardware into schemes that had exceeded its 3 year depreciation as a business tool. Thus the green box can be ticked and costs of disposal deferred or avoided. If your organisation is going down this route, do not overlook support provision, or that this older gear will be more prone to breakdown.

Download the full report for bedtime reading at: http://www.housemark.co.uk/hmresour.nsf/lookup/HM_ITC_BM_rpt_2013.pdf/$File/HM_ITC_BM_rpt_2013.pdf

You can link with me on LinkedIn here - uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/ It would be great to connect !

A House - I Am The greatest.


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

PS As usual, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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Best In The (Housing) World

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK
or LinkedIn here uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/

While doing some work at one of my customers the other day, during a spot of downtime I had a look at the Housing Technology IT Supplier Review 2013. I don’t know if you caught this, if you are in Housing IT I am sure George Grant emailed you to let you know it had been completed.

Two results that made me smile were the areas where my old shop MIS-AMS came top of the pile; CRM and Asset Management. In some ways I was not surprised as that's two modules and application areas I know like the back of my hand. Also I had a lot of involvement in the design, implementation and customer facing aspects of getting those two modules right. They are pretty good to be sure (as I recall two of the Irish customers telling us), but seriously are they that much better than specialist offerings?

MIS-AMS ActiveH comes out way better than Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Surely is that not cream of the crop, supported by one of the world’s leading desktop software authors? MS Dynamics CRM did score highly on value for money, but then surely it should be, due to volume discounts and the like. So did the respondents skew the results? Strangely I had this conversation with an old colleague at another housing management systems supplier later in the week. I didn’t think so.

The differences boil down in my opinion to that old chestnut integration and look and feel. Adding Dynamics CRM or maybe Civica’s Contact Manager to a vertical market set of modules, such as a HMS provides training and significant integration issues. Out of the box costs are quite low, plumbing it all together is where resource, frustration and compromises slip in. So I am not surprised that bespoke CRM integrations score currently below out of the box CRM with all its links with Rents, Repairs, ASB, Web Portal, Planned Maintenance, Service Charges, Care, Development and Financial modules. Microsoft Dynamics CRM has come a long way from its original ‘bag of integration tools’ approach of a few years ago, but for most I don’t think it’s quite there yet.

Asset management is another mystery area. How on earth can a generic asset management module from the smallest player in this sector score higher than a specialist module such as Keystone, built by a team of ex-surveyors around housing needs? If I were Keystone I would be a bit worried. If I were Promaster or PIMSS I would be calling a working party to ask why on earth that might be.

If you are an ICT manager reading this or an Asset Manager, you can probably guess why the responses looked like they did. What are your day to day difficulties with your modules in place? It’s probably lack of or inconsistent integration, maybe a silo style approach which does not bring the main organisation into the orbit of asset management. Visibility counts for a lot when your housing officers are on the scheme and cannot answer basic asset orientated queries. Off-shore islands of data held in a separate asset management system (some even in a foreign database that has difficulty talking to your main ones) are not conducive to efficiency.

Opportunities to integrate well with voids, planned works, response repairs both ways are laborious, unreliable and often just abandoned for just that reason. I would guess from experience that Keystone is the best integrated of the respondents, hence it’s up there near the top. The Capita (old IBS) module deserves to be up there too. Obviously with Capita or MIS-AMS ActiveH, integration consists of setting the right parameters and code tables, not calling in the plumbers!

No-one should take any of the above as an endorsement (...other HMS & bolt on modules are available, all trademarks acknowledged etc..). The choice is always down to organisation needs. Just because it works in one RSL does not guarantee it will work in yours.

If you have a badly performing Assets or CRM module, get in touch, you know where to find me!


You can link with me on LinkedIn here - uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/ It would be great to connect !

Dr Feelgood - Best In The World.


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

PS As usual, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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