Inside Housing - Comment - Joining the dots: are we being proactive enough?

Inside Housing – Comment – Joining the dots: are we being proactive enough?

10 November 2023

in DOT

Reading Time: 10 mins read

Ian Joynson

Ian Joynson is executive director of asset management at The Guiness Partnership

We need to rethink our approach to data and information if we ever want to get ahead of our problems, states Ian Joynson

Inside Housing – Comment – Joining the dots: are we being proactive enough?

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We need to rethink our approach to data and information if we ever want to get ahead of our problems, states Ian Joynson #UKhousing

Why does data sometimes feel like our problem as a sector, when we have so much of it? Why do we spend so much of our energy and resources responding to issues, rather than getting ahead of them?

How do we better support the increasing number of customers who have complex needs? My view is that all of these questions (and many others) could be addressed if we better utilised data and acted on it. Or, to coin a phrase, if we “joined the dots” more.

Two high-profile and much publicised events help make this case.

First, the explosion in damp and mould cases over the past year. Last winter, The Guinness Partnership saw a 100% increase in cases and this is not atypical. While some of these are property issues pure and simple, others are linked to a complex range of circumstances, including energy costs, overcrowding and poverty.

Like others, we have built a predictive model to identify those properties where the risk of damp and mould is highest. The data used by this model is coming from sources right across our operations.

Second, the Sheila Seleoane case. In my view, Peabody deserve huge credit for the transparency with which they have helped us all learn from what happened. One of these learnings is “joining the dots” between different data sources to identify an underlying issue.

A lack of response to a request to complete an electrical check on a property may indicate one thing in isolation, but if the customer has also stopped paying rent and was not reachable for another query it may indicate something more worrying.

“We need to identify triggers that tell us when we should break out of the normal transactional approach to services”

The third angle is an efficiency one. Like any service delivery organisation, the Pareto principle applies and the effort associated with serving 20% of our customers eclipses that of serving the other 80%. This is not their fault and it’s absolutely natural that some of our customers are facing complex challenges of many sorts, some of which impact on the landlord services they need.

But what it does mean is that we have an opportunity to approach those customer relationships in a different way. We need to identify triggers that tell us when we should break out of the normal transactional approach to services which works for most customers most of the time and instead employ a holistic case management approach.

At Guinness. we have recently developed a management information tool we’re calling “jeopardy management”. This joins up data from across the organisation to build a more complete picture of our customer activity.

One way of imagining this is as a Venn diagram of different activity circles eg hard to access properties, properties with high volumes of repairs, rent arrears, high inbound calls. At the intersection where these circles overlap is a group of customers who need us to serve them in a different way. And that means shifting to a proactive approach.

This isn’t rocket science I realise. So why isn’t it long–established business as usual for all our organisations? First, many of us are grappling with legacy IT systems that are not well integrated. Putting data together is not as easy as it should be. We can be better at operating across functions and breaking down silos.

Second, some would argue that providers have become too big to see the patterns. I’m not sure I buy that personally. In a world in which the amount of data is said to be doubling every two years, even the most geographically concentrated providers would struggle to depend on local knowledge alone.

Finally, I wonder if we’re subconsciously a little bit scared at what we might find. The old adage that “if you look, you will find” is borne out by our experiences as landlords. Finding unreported problems isn’t necessarily the news that over-stretched operational teams grappling with post-pandemic pressures want to hear.

But the conclusion of recent years might well be that even if we don’t look, the challenges facing our customers come and find us anyway. And they’re ours to help fix.

Ian Joynson, executive director of asset management, The Guiness Partnership