Housing association X.0

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What would a housing association look like if it started up today?

I often find this sort of thought experiment useful in my work to explore the optimum solution and the gap between it and the present state. The specific question above has been on my mind recently and then reading this recent post prompted me to write this short post.

So what would a housing association look like if it started up today?

Would it have no offices?

Would it have no contact centres?

Would its non-face to face transaction happen primarily online?

Would its staff to property ratio match Or beat Dutch peers?

How would it do repairs and maintenance, would it even do repairs and maintenance?

Would its systems be mobile first and cloud first?

Would it fully understand the macroeconomic and microeconomic impact of its decisions around its rent mix and tenure types?

Would it only develop houses that meet the passivhaus standard?

Would it pioneer sustainable, cheap home building, e.g. Structural panel techniques?

Would its homes be ‘smart’? Would the brains of the housing association not only be the people who work for it, but the analytical insight it mines automagically to inform and guide pro-active service delivery?

Would the contention between its social conscience and commercial existence be resolved?

Would its choice of revenue diversification targets be different from the low risk, low margin choices of many?

I’m sure many of you could think of many other questions that grow from asking ourselves the seed question. What are your thoughts? @ me and/or tweet use #HAversX 

(btw, the title of the post is X.0 rather than 2.0 or 3.0 because, as Calum Mercer mentioned, some Housing Associations have been around in one version or another for a very longtime)

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5 Trends Spotted at Forrester’s Forum for Technology Management

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PwC had the privilege to sponsor Forrester’s Forum for Technology Management Leaders this week in Orlando and our team had a great time and learned a great deal.  We distilled our conversations into 5 trends that we think are picking up steam based on what we heard. 1. We are Nearing the Digital Moment of Truth Nigel Fenwick, one of Forrester’s principal analysts serving CIOs, described findings from their research on the state of “digital” in […]

The Museum of Future Housing Tech

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On June 24th I’ll be at House Party 2014 ’Curating’ a ‘Museum of Future Housing Technology’.

What is a museum of future housing technology?

Well, that is up to whoever visits the museum! The visitors will be creating the exhibits!

During the day visitors to the museum will have the opportunity to:

  1. Join a group of interesting people
  2. Share and discuss their problems and those of their customers
  3. Pick an interesting area or theme from the discussion
  4. Prototype a technology enabled solution to their problem. Each team will create a prototype of an idea using Post-it’s, paper, cardboard, plasticine, role play, video, storyboards and whatever else can be found lying around.
  5. The prototype will become an exhibit in the ‘Museum of Future Housing Tech’

Hopefully over the day we’ll build up an interesting and thought provoking collection of exhibits as together we explore how technology might help us solve problems for ourselves and our customers.

Sessions will run at set times throughout the day and will last approximately 30 minutes, so hopefully there be lots of opportunity to drop in and contribute to the museum and view the freshly created exhibits.

The end collection of exhibits will hopefully be

  • A representation of some key challenges that the housing sector faces
  • A manifestation of some interesting and innovative thinking about how technology might enable solutions to those challenges

Sound interesting? then if you haven’t already head over here to get your ticket.

Fancy helping out and/or contributing to the ‘Museum of Future Housing Technology’? then please get in touch here

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