Last year I was involved in some good conversations facilitated by Hact around the current state of the technology tools that are used within Housing Associations (short blog about it here), this was partly sparked by a couple of blog posts I wrote here and here. The thing that was evident for me from the discussions, which included around 10 Heads of IT/IT Directors from various housing associations was the pent up demand to think and act differently in terms of tools we use to enable our organisations to achieve their goals.
So, what happened? not much for a number of reasons, but looking on a year or so from those conversations there is more need than ever for us to revisit the thinking behind these meetings and do something:
- Incumbent suppliers still not delivering to the needs of the sector
- Business ambitions curtailed or impeded through an inability to provide the right tools for the job
- Market and government forces putting even greater pressure on the sector to think and act differently and requiring an even greater flexibility and agility from the technology that should enable the organisations.
- Larger Housing associations are moving into largescale CRM and/or ERP implementations
- Housing associations still buying ‘all in one’ or ‘best of breed’ solutions that simply don’t fit their businesses
- OJEU compliant procurements that may be successful in-spite of rather than because of the process
- Manifesto, Principles, 10 commandments, whatever you want to call it, lets create a statement of intent, a banner under which we can congregate that set out very clearly what we expect from the technology that supports out organisations (potential e.g. mobile first, API, open standards, etc).
- Once we have this manifesto we can use it to drive change, change in how we behave as informed and strong customers, change in how our incumbent and future suppliers think about and develop the software tools that we use
get in touch via Twitter and we’ll get things moving.
