We’re finalists in three categories at this years Housing Technology Awards: digital transformation, innovation and data management. We’re taking the opportunity to take a deep dive into what we’ve been up to and why we’re being recognised.
For the data management award we’ve been nominated for our innovations in data governance. Shae McCalla, head of data governance and performance, tells us more:
Our updated approach to data governance has formed the backbone of our data strategy. We believe it’s exciting, it’s different, and more importantly, it’s working.
Our approach to data governance has been to use data to solve significant business problems and deliver to strategic aims. Finding problems that need addressing, understanding how they link to data, and helping those running the business to solve them.
In 18 months, we’ve transformed the way colleagues think about their data, that it’s theirs and an asset to nurture. We’ve created a framework, embedded roles, introduced tools and capability in-house to do the technical work and we are delivering projects in agile sprints.
We now have twelve data assets continually improving their condition including component data, building heights, fire risk assessment, as well as customer sales. It’s created momentum to extend the work, to introduce master data management and move forward.
Historically our data was well managed by good people but was siloed and lacking systematic practices and head space. So we weren’t starting from a blank canvas.
We worked hard to build consensus amongst our executive board and mobilise, seeking out examples of where data was hampering their aims. We took a project-based, iterative, and agile approach, focused on areas of high-risk and high interest, built a team of data governance experts, growing internal talent who had context, developed their technical skills to write queries, surfaced great visuals. We developed methodologies and workshops to work through the value chain and engage colleagues, to identify and solve the biggest challenges posed by poor data. We helped colleagues get closer to their data, more curious, starting to think about what they really need the data for.
Support provided included bespoke training for each new data governance role, automated rules to monitor and track data condition in real time, and a process for identifying and tackling new data issues. This ensured that data condition improvement linked to key business benefits and teams could track data condition improvement over time and were motivated to do so. They banked the benefits and saw the impact, not just an arbitrary completeness number – a subtle but important shift (this is the gold dust) – ‘I have 95% of the data I need to plan my programme’, as opposed to 'I have 130,000 individual pieces of quality data.'
Through our work we’ve got to a place where the importance of good condition data with strong governance and ownership is fundamental meeting our strategic aims. Our executives talk openly about data, its importance to our objectives and have integrated it as a key part of our Better Together corporate strategy.
Data governance continues to be a key part of our data strategy, helping us mitigate risk and respond to changing regulator requirements. Greater insights and improved decisions are coming from the better conditioned data because it’s now trusted and used. It’s enabled colleagues to create reports with the data, as well as giving significant operational and commercial benefits where poor data had hampered productivity and created waste. It’s unlocking advanced analytics and data science techniques which depend on having a solid foundation of good, clean data that’s trusted and governed effectively.
Key achievements to date include:
- Establishing process, tools, and collateral to roll out a data governance framework focused on improving the quality of data for ‘key business benefits’ rather than just improved silos of data.
- Strengthened governance with data condition KPIs visible to group and executive boards.
- Mitigating risk, using governed data in key responses to the Regulator of Social Housing, our group board and the Housing Ombudsman.
- Assurance in component data for planning purposes improved one-third.
- Supporting us to improve our data to ensure safety, compliance and sound decisions over time, and that our customers’ homes are safe by governing building heights and fire risk assessment data, giving visibility of risk areas.
- Contributing to our drive to deliver value for money and be efficient by supporting our sales teams to improve their data condition, using this to market better, and drive conversion improvements. Sales property data held improved 71% in five months.
- Increasing awareness around the importance of data governance across our organisation and establishing data roles and creating e-learning modules.
