EA Voices

It has been a while since my last post, but I do plan to get back into a more regular posting mode. The main reason is actually selfish. During the time when I wrote a lot here on my blogs my thoughts became more clear and it was easier for me to drive…

By: Ben Geller, VP Marketing, Troux

A traditional approach to Enterprise Architecture might suggest spending a significant amount of time (in some cases this could last as long as a year) gathering data from different parts of the business in the hope of building a holistic view of how the business looks today. Once you are sitting on this mass of data you may then consider EA tools to help you make sense of it all. To some people this seems a logical sequence– we’ll do the heavy data lifting on our end then call in the analytics guys to tell us what it all means. In reality this approach will often lead to wasted effort and set back the timetable for delivering value. As we discussed in a recent post, Bigger Doesn’t Always Mean Better when it comes to data. With the right EA tool in place, organizations better understand the data that is actually needed to yield business benefits, dramatically increasing success rates and significantly reducing time to value.  

Why the data first approach is flawed

This approach typically involves time wasted on gathering data that is not necessary or will not deliver significant value. Once the data has been collected organizations often invest additional time and effort verifying data quality, but that can become a daunting task as well if the amount of data is too great and the quality of the necessary data is compromised. In addition data needs to be governed otherwise it goes stale rapidly. If organizations are working with more data than they need, they end up spending even more time and effort governing data that isn’t useful. 

Successful data maintenance is federated, involving busy people who need to understand why they should spend time on this vital task.  Modern EA solutions come with governance tools and processes built-in, and knowledgeable tools vendors typically bundle in best practice guidance to help get data in good shape.  The do-it-yourself approach, without adequate guidance and tool support is very often the long, slow, hard and potentially unsuccessful route.

For these reasons start with the end in mind, find a tool that helps guide you to the desired outcome, and let it define what data is necessary.

Architect a better business in a different way

Start by identifying the key questions that need to be answered to help the organization better operate, compete, and grow. You will be pleasantly surprised – it’s not as many as you might think. Organizations have discovered that as few as 150 questions may be enough to understand the enterprise sufficiently in order to figure out how to change it.  Mature EA vendors will have incorporated the most common questions into their tools, questions such as: What new business capabilities need to be created? Is the business investing in the right places? Do our strategies support our goals? The tool will provide decision-making insights in the form of visualizations.  Also, don’t underestimate the power of the visualization to drive the data quality process: a CIO of a major European Telco told us “I’m interested in your tool because it will point my guys in the direction of what data to collect, and I believe lighting up your reports will drive the data quality process quicker than any other method”.  Spot on, sir!

Everyone is looking for a better way to achieve their business objectives. But in this instance doing the heavy lifting that comes along with collecting massive amounts of data may not be worth the effort. In fact, it’s better to start small. Get the most out of your EA initiative by focusing on what matters most to business. This will determine what questions need to be answered.  The right tool can guide you through what data is needed and deliver results – quickly.

Download the Troux Mind Map to see how Troux solutions help businesses better understand what data is really needed and enable decision-makers to see results – quickly.

 

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TLDR:

We all do the same things, lets stop pretending we are unique and start pooling our resources to multiply the value we can deliver to our customers. What would a ‘platform for housing’ look like?

Housing associations are funny things:

We all do the same things.

The hierarchy of our customers needs doesn’t change much from organisation to organisation.

We often do the same things differently.

We all do the same things with differing degrees of outcome and efficiency.

Example? Recognise some of these terms?

• Mobile working
• Digital
• Online self services
• Multi/Omni channel
• Channel shift
• Customer relationship management
• Business intelligence
• Data quality
• (the list goes on and on)

We do all do the same things.

We organise ourselves similarly, we support processes with a similar information system architecture. If (as I have) you view the pattern of the architecture of different housing associations side by side, often the only things that change are the names of the suppliers providing the systems.

We all fish in a small pool of suppliers, from talking to peers within the industry the general consensus is a feeling that ranges from disenchantment, through resentment to outright animosity towards the incumbent suppliers serving the sector.

Just as I believe social housing in general is ripe for disruption (in fact we see government policy is already exerting a transformative if not disruptive influence on the industry, but that’s a topic for another post), so too the supplier landscape is also ripe for disruption.

There are two trends i’m aware of within our sector (other than moaning about incumbent suppliers)

1) Some providers are dipping their toes into building their own systems or looking outside of traditional housing applications e.g. CRM

2) Recently there has been a move by larger associations to look to ERP to ‘solve the solved problems’ related to business operation

Its easy to snipe at both these approaches 1) might be driven by a naivety of the complexity and overhead of the challenged such an undertaking presents.

For 2) its the fact that some of these are big, multi-year, multi-million waterfall, big bang implementations with a far-off ROI

Both fail to address the bigger point – that too much of our technology in housing simply seeks to digitise business approaches that have been fundamentally unquestioned over decades, when what we need is technology driven transformation of the way we do business – not least around the way we use data across everything we do.

But picking at these initiatives sort of misses the point.  Rather they are symptoms of a problem that has been bugging me for a while and which I’ll try and reduce down to a few questions:

Q1: Why are we attempting to solve the same problems individually?

Q2: Why can’t we solve some of these problems once, for all?

Q3: Isn’t there value in pooling our resources?

Q4: What would a ‘Platform for Housing’ look like and how could we achieve it?

I don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions, but i think they are questions are should ask ourselves.

What do I think a ‘Platform for Housing’ like?

I haven’t got a definition in my head yet, but in a sentence it would be something along the lines of:

A multi-tenanted, cloud based platform for use by #ukhousing organisations to deliver better services, more efficiently by solving the common problems around #ukhousing information system capability and maximising the value of sharing data assets.

Some principles of the platform might be:

1) Community driven: not quite ‘For housing by housing’ but a platform that is developed and evolved for the good of the housing community with the community supporting (through usage, funding, resource)

2) Pooled data to maximise insight: whilst each housing providers core data would be sacrosanct, all could benefit from mashing subsets of their data with the community, imagine turning patch insight into national insight

3) Born in the cloud:  designed for scalability, taking advantage of cloud economics

4) API all the things:

The platform would not be just a new silo, it would be designed from the ground up to enable interoperability because of the recognition that any new system needs to be part of a wider ecosystem not the ecosystem.  In fact, current technology providers could go a long way towards improving where we are now by more effectively opening up systems too often closed to the outside world for reasons of cynical commerciality (but that’s another blog for another time).

5) Human centred: The development of the platform is not just driven from the perspective of business efficiency or ‘what we can do’, but those perspectives combined with an understanding of customer need.

I’m really conscious that this post may not be very coherent, but lots of conversations with people in our industry finally spurred me to try and nail something down. We can see some of these ideas being explored tentatively at HACT through their Housing Big Data collaboration and emerging work on cloud based next generation housing management emerging from UCL.

My hope is, in putting some sort of sketch down that, through discussion, interrogation, argument and collaboration we might get to something coherent; that there may be an opportunity for our community to help itself do better for our customers through rethinking our relationship with technology. I appreciate that tech is only part of that story, but its a start….

Please get in touch on twitter bakedidea

And I’ll be hosting a workshop on the “Housing platform of the future” at HouseParty in Manchester in June – follow @Hseparty for information on tickets and programme as soon as they come out