New service to help social landlords tackle data issues

A new organisation has launched to help the social housing sector tackle widespread problems with data management.

Illumar, a collaboration between Inprova and Insource, aims to help social landlords have one single, trusted source of data.

It has been set up in response to warnings about data management from the Regulator of Social Housing.

In its most recent Sector Risk Profile, the regulator reminded providers about its requirements for reporting data, stating that ‘failure to provide timely and accurate data will be reflected in the judgement of a provider’s compliance with the regulatory standards’.

The social housing sector spends over £400m per year on technology and 84% of this is on software, systems and consultancy.

Yet much of this goes towards creating bespoke data processing systems, often built from scratch by different internal teams and individuals within housing organisations, using outdated or inappropriate technology and design standards.

As a consequence of this approach, most housing providers don’t have joined-up, integrated or automated data management systems.

‘Working with over 900 housing providers, we see the data challenges that housing providers face on a daily basis,’ said Inprova’s managing director, Steve Malone.

‘Through collaboration, we’ve created Illumar, which is agnostic to core housing systems, but brings information together in a unified data layer. This will enable organisations, regardless of their systems, to rapidly use a standard approach, rather than developing costly in-house, bespoke data solutions.’

And the chairman of Insource, Steve Aitken added: ‘There are so many similarities between the health and housing sectors in terms of their data requirements and how it needs to be managed. We have already evidenced that the lessons learnt in the complex data ecosystem of the NHS will help resolve data problems in social housing.

‘Insource’s partnership with Inprova and the creation of Illumar is the first step in enabling social landlords to solve the data management problems that are creating significant inefficiencies and keeping their senior managers and board members awake at night.’

Photo Credit – Geralt (Pixabay)