Raven Housing Trust is a housing association, based mainly in Surrey and Sussex. The company supports around 7,000 homes and all of the customers in it’s homes are based in the community. It also supports people in the community with their outreach support services.
Raven’s core purpose is building homes and changing lives.
Julia Mixter, the Director of Transformation, and Martin Honeywood, the Programme Transformation Director, recognized the significance of data transformation to overcome the challenges in the housing space and sought a scalable platform that could accommodate growth, great customer experience and service and future technologies such as AI and IoT.
Like many other Housing Associations, Raven is faced with a rapidly evolving landscape due to impact of inflation, economic uncertainty, customers expectation to access and receive services as a seamless online experience and quality of housing and the affect it has on people’s lives.
Even prior to the national number of tragic, high profile cases in the news. Raven saw the need to be able to quickly answer questions about its’ quality of housing stock and the needs of those individuals and families living in them. This led Raven to commence a multi-year enterprise wide Digital Transformation to improve efficiency and customer experience.
Not unlike many organisations today, Raven had a varied technology estate with many different platforms and systems used to undertake its’ core business processes, most of which did not ‘talk’ to each other. This posed several of the usual challenges, including multiple different versions of the truth requiring time consuming monthly and annual reconciliation activities and a lack of visibility of data from one business area to another of common/related or important data to drive service improvements.
Typically, digital transformations will bring change to people, process and technology only and leaving a void in Data. Raven recognised the importance of data in digital transformation upfront and the need to have the data to answer simple questions; like when was the last time someone visited a customer? OR what was the next steps on that mould problem?
Raven has in place a small central Data Team provided key reporting to the leadership team, however the demand for data and insights was only set to grow. Raven recognised that adopting digital technologies and leveraging their data assets would be key in order to better serve their customers and communities, and could significantly enhance their efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall impact. However an initial internal analysis revealed that the data as a discipline needed a great deal of work; especially around internal leadership and governance, aligning strategic direction with data journeys, experience of delivering data projects, optimising the information systems landscape through data integration, ensuring data is preserved for compliance, understanding the importance of data governance and creating suitable governance frameworks.
Raven identified the need for a specialist partner together with whom it will become possible to build a data centric organisation. After a competitive selection from a pool of consultant, vendors and systems integrators, Raven embarked on a data driven digital transformation journey with us, 7Dxperts.
7Dxperts delivered on the data transformation objectives in the back of our three core competencies.
For Raven Housing, it was crucial to have a partner who had a deep understanding of their industry, have a grasp the objectives and goals as well as the significance of these to their customers and staff. In 7Dxperts, Raven found a partner that could transform their objectives into an achievable solution, providing support throughout the process and delivering both technical and business results.
In the delivery 7Dxperts were able to meet the appetite for change with a right paced approach to delivery; focussing on some quick wins to address the immediate pain points such as the Infohub, whilst also setting expectations for others areas that may not be obvious at first glance such as the need for a data governance framework to curate the data on an ongoing basis.
Data Governance and Data Quality are intrinsic to any digital transformation programme. Raven needed a technology solution that was secure, flexible and future-ready and the people/process change in place alongside it in order to start realising benefits as soon as possible.
7Dxperts provided data culture consultation in lockstep with the technology delivery so that Raven had the required frameworks, mechanisms and human roles in place to capitalise on the technical solution. This included real-time data governance workshops, in-person training, and e-learning materials providing Raven and its staff with the required skills and confidence to capitalise on the new technology and ways of working.
Raven opted for DataParQ, a low-code tool that enables rapid processing of diverse data sources and enhance data quality standards. DataParQ facilitates the efforts to develop robust data governance strategies and prepare for future growth.
Raven’s data estate included structured and unstructured data, held in several disparate systems. DataParQ was able to extract Raven’s diverse data sets from various sources and in differing states with ease and speed, whilst also providing Raven with key insights into data quality and the ability to amend data before it was made available in reporting. This was key to addressing Raven’s data quality challenges, and also in facilitating the new human data governance roles and framework that had been delivered.
Raven needed a platform for reporting and data analysis and they found it with DataBricks. Not only did it meet their immediate needs, but it also offers the potential for predictive analytics as the company grows. This tool provides the flexibility to adapt to future needs and enables Raven to scale up as their business expands.
One of the key features that appealed to Raven was DataBricks' Lakehouse architecture. It was able to store data in different formats from all of Raven’s existing systems, and enabled fast querying for reporting and visualisation via their inhouse tool, PowerBI. The Databricks lakehourse architecture also allows Raven for iterative building. This gives the opportunity to repeatedly bring areas of the company on board with the data within the lake.
To enhance their data analysis and visualization capabilities, Raven also implemented Power BI. This helped them gain deeper insights into their data and make informed decisions.
As well as the short term, retrospective reporting – understanding ‘why’ something happened – innovation was also important to Raven.
Raven wanted to employ new and emerging technologies such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence with a view to progressing towards predictive analytics – understanding ‘when’ something was likely to happen – in order to identify properties at risk of damp/mould, for example.
DataParQ and Databrick’s Lakehouse facilitates this medium term goal as well, paving the way for Raven to advance on their journey towards a mature data culture.
