Step inside (and survey) this house

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK

One comes along about every five years and most try to tackle 20% annually internally to keep on top of it. Yes, most IT teams have grappled with one. Yes, the ‘External Asset Survey’. Easily £65K or more of investment in even quite small RSL’s.


Many, although well tendered in my experience are time and effort wasted. Probably 40% of asset surveys I have seen, produced data in an electronic format that was incompatible with any systems already in place. On occasion, the tender just asked for ‘data in electronic format’. A PDF satisfies that one. Although a PDF is not too structured ready for import. So how can we improve this situation if your organisation has an asset survey in the business plan?


Good communication is a great start, between the ICT team, Assets Team (and your procurement people, if a formal process is to be used). Very often a survey is initiated, data received and then delivered to the ICT team to process. On many occasions, content of the survey will be driven by selected external surveyors rather than your Assets Team. This also creates an issue where collected data will bear little resemblance to what is perhaps configured to be stored in your HMS, Keystone, Promaster, Codemaster system etc.


To break that cycle, the process should be placed on its head.


If your asset management module is not particularly working well, address some of those key issues first. Integration can and is an issue with many modules out there. It can be difficult sometimes to even agree a property figure between the HMS and a third party asset/planned maintenance system. Have you got a situation like that? Some do perform better than others and some can be better ‘plumbed’ together than others. I have seen some brilliant integration as well as some disgraceful cases. As a first move, ensure your asset list, to supply to your external surveyors can be reconciled between the two systems. That will save annoying leaseholders, anyone called ‘Mr Void’ or previously deceased contacts by letter.


The next step is to look carefully at your structure. Can you identify what flats sit within discrete blocks? If this is available and accurate it will assist in collection of appropriate linked data. More crucial is what I would call the ‘attribute structure’, information on what components are or could be fitted, what quantities are present, remaining lives, condition and costs. Work out what unique identifier will be the ID or UPRN for each asset (where asset can be rentable or not), and what system it will come from.


In a simplistic way I like to see as few attributes as possible. I find its good for my Ying and Yang, small can be beautiful if carefully formed. I believe every single one needs to pay its way. We should know why we collect each piece of data and what return, report or process it supports. For example, a gas service attribute supports the annual cyclical ‘Gas safe’ certification. Failure of that one to be set up or recorded properly would have critical consequences for your chief exec. Kitchen data will support planned programmes, Decent Homes or Scottish Housing Quality Standard reporting. For a lot of other attributes it’s a big greyer. Where storing data is not justified or you cannot tell what useful information it can be turned into, its best let go. Although it does not appear like it does, every bit of data stored and kept up to date has an associated cost. So trim some of the fat.


The asset team should then design the survey based on your attribute structure in the system. Once the attribute structure supports it we effectively have a place for any piece of data that might be collected for a particular asset. So far so good. Now a map of all fields, data types, codes etc should be generated for the external surveyor to set up their survey around. Most survey companies these days use hand-helds and for each question, say for types, will show dropdowns just with your codes and descriptions in them. Therefore our incoming data will be of the right type of content for our imports.


The next step is to coach your surveyors in what syntax for the incoming data might be. By syntax I mean format, i.e. CSV fixed length, whatever your applications will support. This step can actually work well if carried out really early in the tender process, in order to press this point home.
Chances are that a format per attribute might be needed, with a row per asset or UPRN. Those systems that force lots of redundant columns to be present in the import, if you have got one of those, will be guaranteed to annoy your surveyors. Just ride that one out. There’s nothing more galling than surveying for Welsh Decent Homes and each import has several dozen empty columns for English and Scots versions. Developers can be so lazy sometimes can’t they?


OK the ground work has been done, have a sample of assets (minimum 20) surveyed and test the resultant data will correctly go through the import into your system. If that user acceptance test works, check that your reports reflect the same suggestions (as to replacement costs or ability to pass Decent Homes etc) as your surveyors. Any difficulties here should ring alarm bells.


If you have got to this point, you will be ‘cooking with foil’ as they say. You will have joined that 60% of RSL’s that are on track to get the most from the investment in a robust asset survey. Shame it’s not like the old days when you did a LSVT, Saville’s did a gold plated survey/valuation and you got a free copy of PIMSS.

This has been a proper high speed Pendolino whistle stop tour through this mine field of a subject. If you or your organisation are planning a major asset survey soon or wrestling with an unruly third party assets module, feel free to get in touch. I will do my best to help!

Read on to: Whats your favourite Promaster or Keystone ?

Step Inside This House.


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

PS 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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White Paper Lines

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

As anyone in the Social Housing sector interested in asset management or compliance will tell you, the Grenfell Enquiry has provided essential insights, this last year. 

Coupled with the social housing white paper strapline of ‘Keeping residents in social housing safe, listened to, living in good quality homes, and having access to redress when things go wrong’, there are more pressure on Asset Management Teams, than ever before.

In fairness, a lot of asset management teams have been on top of this for some years, albeit with fragmented solutions and system tools available. Spreadsheets or ‘best of breed’ applications were the traditional go-to places to store data. Loose or (frankly in some cases) pitiful integration, often helped make some asset teams quite siloed and detached from the rest of the housing operations.

Some of the better asset management solutions are now getting somewhat long in the tooth, or needing substantial investment to remove Silverlight too, which is unsupported from this year by Microsoft. Much better integration with where the rest of the housing solutions sit, plus a window into self-service, is necessary to engage openly with residents, so they know their RSL/RP has procedures in place and they have evidence they are being followed to keep them safe in their homes. 

Grenfell has put an essential spotlight on FRA’s (Fire Risk Assessments) and resident trust in other compliance. Another area where a separate Asbestos, Fire Risk or Gas Servicing solution could represent a cats cradle of more data silos, some in a browser, others only accessible in the office. Increasingly, to better service and support residents, more or all of this asset data needs to be in a single repository. Where a wide selection of Housing Management system modules are in use with a decent EDRMS, if the quality of asset/compliance offerings is good, it makes sense to consolidate there. Potentially it can be cheaper too, when annual licence & support costs are considered.

In many sites, I think its management inertia that has traditionally put the brakes on considering sorting this out. One site I do work for, every other year, we do an asset reconciliation. There is one figure there from the Fixed Assets ledger, one from HMS, one from the DLO system, one from Assets and one from a compliance team. All differ and the one we go with every time is a managers Excel spreadsheet. On concluding the gathering of the figure each time, I remind them that all of this could be integrated and consolidated in a project of 3-9 months, providing additional efficiencies. Without talking out of turn, I would be adding more value as Critical Friend helping them get it done, than counting the disparate parts every 24 months. As the above demonstrates, many organisations keep old survey data, which is little or no value.

What might be referred to as ‘The Golden Thread’ is often missing from many organisations and their asset strategies. In the tragic event of a serious incident occurring in a block or other asset, how long will it take to bring evidence together, of previous good management? Data commonly can be so dispersed/siloed, it takes days or weeks to determine chronologies or where safety and compliance was at in that location. If it takes longer than a couple of hours, I would say your systems are not adequately supporting this aspect.

In the last few months I have done a lot of work with some Northgate HMS sites, who now have the opportunity to close the loop and bring all the separate elements into a single browser presented and cloud ready solution. Following on from Hackitt, more organisations are discovering the buck stops at them. Even where good practice is in place, there is seldom the conduit in disparate solutions and data stores, to share with residents that accountability and responsibility that is being exercised.

The joined up approach that can be implemented within Northgate Housing, creates many new efficiencies. We have all encountered £2,700 being spent on preparing an essential void and within eighteen months, the assets team rip it out as part of their pre-planned programme and replace it again.

Using standard facilities in the main platform, all the good stuff around customer communications can be coordinated. There’s nothing worse than the asset management solution being a week behind the HMS data, a nightmare for Housing GDPR, but also opportunities for putting contractors and staff in danger. A visit in twos warning should not take up to a week, to be utilised properly within the asset management team. Scheduling and mobile all come into this picture too.

 Visualised risks delivered by dashboard

Being properly plugged into the main HMS, also means that a 360 degrees CRM view, can see asset management activity too. So often the asset silo is a blind spot, which causes frustration for all. Residents frequently chasing queries twice or more and generally too many hand-offs and hand-overs. Done properly, sharing necessary asset and compliance data and certificates in self-service, is a matter of 30 minutes of less than taxing configuration. Its like providing ‘the golden thread’ as a bi-product.

 Fire Risk and follow up management

Being able to connect all your compliance contractors, into a flexible integration platform is another advantage, that cuts out so much of the admin usually required. Consuming data, not PDF’s being rekeyed, is the way forward. One other aspect of integration is plugging into IOT and home automation to protect our assets. Its great to see Northgate customers, such as Wolverhampton Homes prove how problems such as damp can be handled, as well as helping residents better manage energy bills and usage, potentially tackling fuel poverty too.

Internet Of Things (IOT) monitoring dashboard

Keeping all this data in sync and stored in the same database, enables better cross module analysis, such as viability. Say goodbye to importing data once a year to process viability, once set up fill your boots three times a day if you feel like it.

Water Risk management dashboard

The point I am making here is that consolidating your data makes life easier, with decent visualisation tools, in addition to making bankable savings. At a time when quite a few asset management solutions are being rewritten, look again at your housing management system. There may be a second option there, like with my examples here with Northgate, that will take you to a better place.

All power to Northgate taking advantage of all the NEC investment from Japan, now rebranding as ‘NEC Software Solutions’, bringing a clear integrated, ready to go, Assets alternative offering. Others would do well to consider a similar approach. 

Read more about 'Smart, Safe and Sustainable Social Housing Solutions' on the NPS site at https://northgateps.com/software-solutions/housing-management-solution/

Related Post: UAT - Take it serious and take control of it

Catch the blog monthly archive at https://soundcloud.com/housingitguy/

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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.

White Lines - Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel.
(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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Dark Maven

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

I read an interesting article in last weeks Guardian about AI targeting of that girls school in Iran and possibly how that went pear-shaped. While most of what papa Trump touches goes wrong this is a surely data shaped cock-up.

The bit in that article lands harder than all the usual breathless AI chat, because it gets to the real problem. It was not some magic machine turning evil on its own. Surprise, surprise it was stale data, bad assumptions, poor governance and human beings building speed on top of shaky foundations. That is the bit people in SocialHousing and Asset Management ought to be paying attention to, because we are in danger of doing our own smaller-scale version of exactly the same thing.

No, social housing is not a war zone (I mean now and again it may feel so!), and I am not being melodramatic. But the underlying lesson is the same. When old, wrong, shanky or incomplete data is fed into newer, faster, more sophisticated reporting tools, the output can look clever while being fundamentally unsound. The system appears confident. The dashboard looks polished. The report has plenty of decimal places. The presentation to the board feels reassuringly modern. Meanwhile the underlying asset data might be a mess. Only our asset management colleagues at the sharp end may actually realise this.

That is our Achilles heel.

I see far too much discussion at the moment about clever tools, predictive analytics, AI, optimisation engines, automated investment planning and all the rest of it, with nowhere near enough honesty about the quality of the data sitting underneath. If your component records are patchy, if installation dates were guessed fifteen years ago during a rushed LSVT stock condition exercise, if replacement history, or subsequent SCS's have not been consistently updated, if attributes have been bulk-loaded from old systems with half the meaning stripped out, then wrapping that in shiny new software does not create truth. It just creates faster nonsense.

And housing does love a bit of faster nonsense at times. We have all seen it. A landlord buys a new asset system, or switches on a new reporting layer, and within five minutes someone wants a thirty-year investment profile, a full life cycle costing model, and a heat map of future liabilities by estate, archetype and component. Lovely stuff on paper. But if your kitchen data is wrong, your roof data is vague, your windows are classified three different ways (by spot cost, by unit, by archetype, or a bit of all?), and half your components are defaulted to generic dates because nobody knew the real answer, then that LCC report is not a strategic asset. It is an expensive comfort blanket.

That is the danger with life cycle costing in particular. People often talk about it as if it is some kind of grown-up, evidence-led answer to long-term planning. In principle, it can be. In practice, it is only as good as the component data, assumptions and replacement rules beneath it. If the dates are wrong, the quantities are wrong, the useful lives are generic, or the survey data is incomplete, then the report can give a completely false sense of control. It can tell you with great confidence that spend will peak in year eight, flatten in year twelve and rise again in year nineteen, when in reality it is built on a pile of half-remembered survey notes, inherited coding structures and wishful thinking.

This is where people get seduced by sophistication. They think the answer to poor information is a better tool. Sometimes the answer is a torch, a clipboard, a proper data model and a grim few months of sorting out the basics. That is less exciting, of course. Nobody gets invited to a conference to say, “we cleaned up our component hierarchy, tightened our validation rules and stopped pretending unknown dates were known.” But that dull work is often worth more than the glossy AI strategy that comes afterwards.

In the article I highlight,  failure was not simply “technology”. The failure was letting a system run at speed while relying on information that no longer matched reality. That should ring bells in housing. We do it when asbestos records are incomplete. We do it when stock condition data is old. We do it when compliance statuses depend on weak integrations. We do it when repairs history does not feed asset intelligence properly. We do it when planned works teams, compliance teams and housing management all hold slightly different versions of the truth and nobody is quite sure which one drives the report to the board.

Then along comes a new supplier or a new platform promising insight. Suddenly old problems are dressed up in modern clothes. Instead of one vaguely  unreliable Excel spreadsheet, you get a dynamic dashboard. Instead of a crude five-year plan, you get scenario modelling. Instead of a rough estimate, you get “predictive” forecasts. But prediction based on bad source data is not insight. It is theatre.

That is the bit I think the sector still does not say loudly enough. Data quality is not some boring back-office technical issue. It is operational risk. It affects compliance, investment, tenant safety, financial planning and organisational credibility. If you do not know what components you have, where they are, when they were installed, what condition they are in, and whether that information has been properly maintained over time, then the fancy reporting layer is not your salvation. It is just a better quality mirror for your confusion.

And to be fair, this is not always laziness or incompetence. A lot of landlords are carrying legacy data structures and systems that were never designed for today’s expectations. They have been through mergers, outsourcing deals, stock transfers, system migrations, rushed mobilisation exercises and years of under-investment in proper data stewardship. Bits of the truth are scattered everywhere. The asset system says one thing, repairs says another, finance codes something differently, and the survey programme has never fully caught up. Then somebody asks for a fully costed decarbonisation pathway or a stock reinvestment plan by component and tenure, and wonders why the answers wobble.Because the data wobbles, so them we assume the system is wibble.

So before anybody gets too excited about AI, digital twins, predictive replacement models or miracle dashboards, there is a simpler question worth asking. Do we trust the component data? Not “is there some data”, not “can the system produce a report”, but do we genuinely trust it enough to make expensive, high-impact decisions from it? If the answer is no, or even “sort of”, then that is where the effort belongs.
 

There is no glamour in saying your first priority is data assurance, better survey discipline, tighter updates from planned works, cleaner integrations and proper governance around defaults, assumptions and exceptions. 

But that is the grown-up answer. In housing, as in every other serious field, speed built on stale data is dangerous. The consequences may differ, thankfully, but the principle does not.
 

We should remember that every time someone waves a shiny new tool in front of us. Clever software cannot rescue weak asset knowledge. It can only amplify it. And if we are honest, that is probably the real lesson here. Our problem is not that housing lacks sophisticated systems. It is that we still too often ask sophisticated systems to compensate for basic uncertainty. That never ends well 

Is your organisation struggling to justify a software change, or worried not everything has been covered? 

Get in touch , I will drop in for a cuppa & bring the Fox's Chocolate Gingers ☕

       Related Post: As a client told me recently, the right Critical Friend, will potentially save you more money than you spend.

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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.

Mansun - Dark Mavis

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


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here , what projects do we get involved in? Access them 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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Bricks and morter

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/
 
Over the years I have worked with many asset managers, good and less so, in the provision of planned maintenance and responsive repair services. My experience many years ago with tank container maintenance made me the perfect choice at a software house for ‘working with planned maintenance types’. Or so my manager convinced me at the time. It did lead to many interesting years, working with some fascinating people. (Arent everyone in housing??)

I have read over the years, many articles and opinions about whether housing IT systems are unnecessarily property orientated and if they should alternatively be centred around customers and residents. Recently, even if the traditional housing HMS package can be replaced with a CRM solution has been discussed on forums. CRM stressing the ‘Customer’ and a few of the wrap around ‘Contact Managers’ from some suppliers obviously fitting this view.

I suspect that the death of the HMS is being over-egged, but in my opinion property and residents (or more accurately assets and customers) are two sides of the housing coin. Both need to work in harmony and if an asset management function is working well, it needs to service both of those, by sharing appropriate information. Key areas include sharing of servicing information (when chasing an arrear it might be appropriate to also chase the outstanding gas service) and information on void and letting (for example adaption levels and likelihood of PM works, like kitchen and bathroom refits being required).

Many options are available. The main HMS might contain integrated modules to record asset and attribute information. External third party solutions can be bolted on to the main HMS, such as Keystone, Promaster or Codeman. The success in ‘bolting on’ (or integrating which is the more proper term), generally determines the usefulness of these solutions to the wider housing organisation. In many cases the former solution can provide better integration yet lighter functionality. The last approach is homegrown spreadsheets or an Access database. These can be adapted to local needs, but may be problematical to share or control among other teams in the organisation.

One mistake often made is over complication of what to record, regarding asset or asset attribute information. By the latter I mean component and other information; Kitchens, Bathrooms, Regular Redecs, Gas or Oil Servicing, EPC status etc. It is important to drive the structure of what is stored to cover the minimum needed and no more. Each piece of data must earn its keep as it carries an inherent cost to store and maintain.  Draw up a list of what essential return or purpose the information is needed. For example, Key and Non-Key attribute data including condition (poor or otherwise), may be needed for decent homes (or SHQS Scottish Housing Quality Standard).

I have met asset managers & surveyors who have come up through an academic route and can define reams of options for everything, rather than relate it strictly to the stock they manage. IE its unlikely to encounter many thatched roofs in social housing, in city centres. I am also keen on the term asset, not property, as repairs should be able to be attributed to blocks, schemes etc as well as individual dwellings. The practice of logging roof repairs on flat one of a block is not a clever one. Having block, scheme or even bin store asset types available makes this a lot easier.  Each need a unique number. Ideally a sequential one, not one composed of segments or additional coding, such as an owning body, area, street, walking order etc. These are all reporting requirements that can change. These are better coded against the asset instead.

Initial asset data can be created from local knowledge, a stock condition survey or from updates from the maintenance programme. It needs to be a living system kept up to date. Where data is stored and not current, staff will lose faith in it very quickly. Housing officers know that uPVC windows are in a certain scheme as they visit it each week, if the repository for asset data reports it as softwood, what else can they not believe?

When other housing staff see inaccuracies, they must have a means to notify the asset manager or asset team to have these issues rectified. Responsible ownership of the data always will benefit the whole organisation.

A last thought to leave you with. It was said to be me once that the good test of your asset system was how long it takes to generate a list in answer to the following question from a resident or applicant: “How many three bed bungalows do you have in the town of X”? Test your asset team and take the stopwatch!

Read On, Who owns Keystone now?

http://tonysmiththathousingitguy.blogspot.com/2014/05/turn-to-keystone.html

I hope this track helps you focus on your assets: Brick House.

(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854655009

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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Figure It Out

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


Its not that frequent that I get involved in data reconciliation’s, but strangely I have helped a few organisations with them in recent weeks. How do you go about checking that what you take from a legacy system, is what lands in your new system? Its even more complex when several legacy systems are coming into a single new system.

So, what should we be looking at?

Well hopefully, data will be extracted into either a staging database or intermediate CSV’s (Comma separated Value flat text files). As anyone will know who has been through this process, its usually something that is carried out by the client, rather than the supplier of the new system. Because of this, its generally not that difficult to generate some statistics at that stage.

When I was a key implementer, I used to have a big list of areas which would be on my main hit list, many of which should be able to be reconciled right to the penny. Examples include rent balances, debit charge, cost of open works orders etc. While grand totals are a great guide, its likely that differences need to be split by Owning Body, Area, Scheme, Trade Type, Needs Category, debit frequency, Current vs Former etc, to meaningfully be sure of the integrity of data.

For my peace of mind too, I always urge my clients to find good legacy reports, to reconcile extracted (staging) data, then data when it lands in the new target system. If these can be passed to Excel, some templates can be developed, to quickly check these. In some cases, I have helped clients create something that can be quickly compared within 15 minutes. This is crucial at migration time and also to have all this ready and pre-cooked.

In an ideal world, regular data cuts could be done, with checks in place, way ahead of the final go-live. All differences need to be chased down quickly, so final go-live will be reliable. Data migrated might include EDRMS documents, appointments from a dynamic scheduler, or other sources.

Its usually common cross-referencing between systems will be in use, to allow data migration. These should be considered and understood to provide a reliable reconciliation. In particular, spot checks of every combination, for individual type of code. E.G. every type of charge code, asset type code etc. Config of these cross-references , during set up needs to be carefully controlled, as does changes in the data extraction that might be done to accommodate these.

Common ‘gotcha areas’ include around tenancy movements. Provisional starts and ends for tenancies, can pretty much always be expected to affect voids and debit values and numbers. These can always be isolated and a decision made if these are held back the last few days of the legacy system, and perhaps manually set in the new system we are moving to.

For audit purposes, a full list of all system areas, legacy data source counts/totals and equivalents in the new system, should be created, before making a decision to go-live. If an agreed reconciliation cannot be agreed, I personally would never suggest its right to go live.

Figuring it out, you can expect, will always shake out some legacy data that needs to be data cleansed. That’s always a bit like an archaeological dig, and a subject for a whole future blog. Before you try to go live with a new system, ensure you have taken time to ‘figure it out’.

Related Post: Big data, much like adolescent sex, in many ways 

Catch the blog monthly archive at https://soundcloud.com/housingitguy/

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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.

Royal Blood - Figure It Out.
(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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Shadowplay

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

Let’s talk about the dangers of shadow IT in social housing, that awkward family secret everyone knows about but nobody wants written down in a board paper. Only last week, a client asked me in the review I am involved with, “Will you be rooting out the ‘Shadow IT’ around here”? Every landlord has it. Most pretend they don’t. And many are quietly running large chunks of their service on it while telling themselves the “core system” is well under control.

In housing, shadow IT isn’t some hoodie-wearing tech rebel spinning up servers in a cupboard. It’s far more British and far more tragic than that. It’s the Excel spreadsheet that started life as a “temporary tracker” during a HMS system or reputational issue back in 2018 and is now the only place anyone can reliably find your damp and mould cases. It’s the Access database built by someone “who was quite handy with IT” and left three restructures ago (we love restructures folks, don’t we?). It’s the compliance supplier web portal that everyone logs into because, frankly, it works, while the landlord’s own system gets updated later, badly, or not at all.

And before anyone gets sniffy, this stuff doesn’t exist because housing staff are idiots. It exists because systems don’t quite do what was promised, change requests (RFC’s) take forever, reporting is weak, and people are judged on outcomes, not architectural purity. When a neighbourhood officer is told to manage risk, meet deadlines, and keep tenants safe, they will use whatever tool actually lets them do that. Governance doesn’t fix a leaking roof.

The problem starts when the workaround quietly becomes the truth. That spreadsheet stops being “just for now” and becomes the thing everyone checks first. The core system becomes something you update to keep ICT happy. Extracts start doing the rounds by email. Versions multiply. Someone adds another tab. Someone else adds free text. Before you know it, you’ve got personal data, compliance information, and operational decisions sitting in a file called “FINAL_v7_REALLYFINAL.xlsx”. Strangely enough, organisations big & small all suffer from this.

At this point, congratulations. You don’t just have shadow IT, you have mission-critical housing services running outside any meaningful control. No proper security. No real audit trail. Poor or no clear ownership. No resilience when the one person who understands it goes on leave or, heaven forbid, leaves the organisation at the end of their contract. (where’s the knowledge transfer, good question?) 

In a regulated sector, this should be setting off alarm bells. Boards are signing off assurances about data quality, compliance, and risk while large chunks of the evidence live in places the organisation officially doesn’t recognise. Auditors ask for a report and suddenly there’s a very awkward conversation about which system is “the real one”. Spoiler: it’s usually not the one that was procured quickly & cost seven figures.

Excel deserves a special mention here. Excel is brilliant. I use it daily. It is not, and never will be, a housing management system, an asset register, a compliance or any other kind of a database. The moment someone says “don’t worry, we manage that in Excel without really understanding how a VLOOKUP works”, what they really mean is “we hope nothing goes wrong and nobody looks too closely”.

Supplier portals get a free pass far too often as well. Portals are fine if they’re part of a proper data flow. They are not fine when they quietly become the system of record and your own system is playing catch-up. At that point you’ve effectively outsourced control of your data without admitting it, documenting it, or governing it. That’s not innovation or disruption, that’s drift.

The most corrosive impact of shadow ICT is what it does to trust. Once staff learn that “the real numbers” live somewhere else, the core system becomes ceremonial. Data quality drops. Reporting becomes a debate rather than a fact. Digital transformation stalls because nobody wants to give up the thing that actually works, even if it’s held together with formulas a hope and a prayer. I should know, I am a fallen Catholic.

This isn’t an argument for banning spreadsheets or telling staff off. Shadow IT is a symptom. It shows you where systems don’t match reality, where governance has slipped, and where organisations have quietly accepted risk in order to cope.

The danger isn’t that shadow IT exists. The danger is continuing to rely on it while pretending it doesn’t.

Because the moment Excel, a portal, or a side system becomes the place the real work happens, your “core system” isn’t core at all. And everyone in the room knows it, even if nobody wants to say it out loud.

Maybe its time a third party came in and rooted out all your organisations “Shadow IT” chief?

Is your SocialHousing  ICT / transformation project drastically overrunning  ? 

Get in touch , I will drop in for a coffee & bring the KitKats ☕

       Related Post: The right Critical Friend will save you stress, time (and money) ?

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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.

Joy Division – Shadowplay

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


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here , what projects do we get involved in? Access them 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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