September 2007
IT FOR HOUSING - BREAKFAST WITH THE EDITOR INTERVIEW WITH REIDMARK & BROADLAND HOUSING ASSOCIATION
Download PDF version of the article - IT for Housing Breakfast with the Editor September 2006
In September 2006 Simon Reay, the Editor of IT for Housing magazine interviewed Broadland Housing Association's Chief Executive Michael Newey and Reidmark Directors Mark Carney and Julian Jackson, about the RSLmanager system.
Simon - Before we start can we just go around the room and introduce ourselves with some personal information
Julian - I am Julian Jackson and I am the Business Development Director at Reidmark. I have been with the company for ten years; I headed up a team to start e-business systems. We branched into hosted systems and about three years ago moved into social housing.
Michael - I am Michael Newey, Chief Executive of Broadland Housing Association. Broadland has just over 4100 properties in Norfolk and North Suffolk. I am a Chartered Surveyor and I moved to the social housing sector ten years ago. When I became Chief Exec of Broadland, Broadland was in some form of crisis with massive governance problems and lots of operational problems. The IT system that I inherited (and I am not an IT professional), was a 1986 Wang installation, so a green screen with a flashing bright green cursor – you can imagine, quite antiquated. It was a case of the IT systems not doing what we needed, I couldn’t access any information and it was very focused on property management; excel spreadsheets, access databases and because everybody was doing it their own way – lots of inconsistencies.
Mark - I am Mark Carney, I am Reidmark’s Managing Director and I have been here for about eight years. Previous to that I worked for a government agency. I am also a Chartered Surveyor by background. I used to work for the investment team attracting overseas companies to the UK. That’s how I got involved in systems because we had to build systems that could handle our enquiries, property assets etc. About four years ago we started exploring more of what we could do with social housing based on our experience in other markets and customer systems. It was initially through some work we did with Liverpool Housing Trust, they wanted to use the web to promote their market rented sector so we were building a system for that but it was using another system to drive information forward. Through the work with them it became apparent that there was a need to bring all of the different systems together.
Simon - Tell us about Reidmark as a business because it works in a number of markets, including overseas doesn’t it?
Mark - As Julian said when he joined the company ten years ago it was the start of what is now known as e-business and we developed the UK’s first on line retail site for a company called Simply Computers, that was Julian’s first major project. We managed to convince Simply that they could sell their products on line, so we built the front end systems and back office system to manage stock. It was a very successful project for them and for us, and they were selling about £40 million worth a year on line. Then around 2000/2001 they were bought by a company called Global, an American company, who then ran the operation from the States. Our biggest market currently is our Lifelong Learning market where we are a major supplier to the Learning Skills Council (LSC). We provide a variety of customer systems for their Lifelong Learning contracts and adult learning initiatives. They are responsible for helping 2.5 million adults improve their basic skills. They run that project through a network of 47 local operations across the country which devolves into hundreds of smaller operations who actually deliver the advice. We provide the LSC with their central system and we also provide the localised customer management systems. We are just about to put the system into a prison which is the first time that a new business system has been allowed to work in a prison, and that’s in Merseyside.
Simon - What is it going to do?
Mark - The idea behind it is that the advisor will sit with the inmate and help them build their action plans - in terms of what they are going to be doing to enhance their skills so that when they come out they will have a clearer path of progression. We are also just embarking on another exciting project in the West of England with nextstep (one of the local lifelong learning offices) down there, where we are looking at bringing in colleges systems as well. Currently, there is a big gap between what the colleges do with the information, advice and guidance (IAG) data they collect. Lots of data is getting lost, which means when people are coming to nextstep centres for further help, they have gone through the process once already but because it hasn’t been collected correctly by the college, they have to through it again. So we are starting to join up the colleges systems.
Simon - So how did you make the step into providing to the RSL market?
Mark - Personally it was something I was quite keen to do because of my background. We took the decision not to go into the commercial market because we felt that there were products out there that could do the job in terms of managing commercial properties. When we looked at the social housing market, and through some of our work with housing associations we saw a need and heard a need that too many organisations were relying on lots of different products - trying to bolt them together, providing lots of work for IT departments but not delivering real sustainable data management, or business information back to front line staff and management teams. We wanted to develop a product that through the day to day operations of the organisation would provide management teams with real time intelligence on what and how the business was doing. At that time, four years ago, there was no e-business system on the market, though some suppliers were beginning to think about using the internet. So following about a year’s worth of research we came up with our prototype which we took to Harrogate.
Simon - So at this point you had no customers. RSL was a new market for you, how did you get the information on tenancies etc to build your prototype?
Mark - Some of it was through my own previous training and we also had a local housing trust work with us on the product as well. The idea behind it was to take it to Harrogate and demonstrate that there was a different way of working, or maybe a better way of working through e-business systems. What we wanted to get across was the dynamics of the information flow - so by simply managing a customer through the system, how we could take that piece of information and use it many, many times. We felt there were too many people having to enter the same information, over and over again. So we built a model that demonstrated that flow. We wanted to get across the fact our system is real time, with KPI’s running all of the time. So we did that at Harrogate and met Michael, which was timely and it tied in with Michael’s aspirations at that time.
Michael - In context I think we met briefly at Harrogate, I had been abroad for five weeks, information gathering and we met again properly at the Birmingham conference in the September. At this point I had actually looked at other products and found nothing that would give me the information I really needed to run an organisation. I suppose I was coming in slightly idealistically. I put down on a piece of paper with my Finance Director what I was looking for, to which he scoffed and said “you won’t find that.” He had also met Mark at Harrogate and had arranged for us to meet up on the Saturday and from that meeting to a decision to go with RSLmanager I think was three weeks.
Simon - That’s a very fast way for a housing association to go. Normally you would spend 6 months tendering etc. The concept of not taking on a traditional supplier and taking on potentially a huge risk.
Michael - I took the biggest risk but ultimately you make that decision and if you have got it wrong you are rewriting your CV again. We made that decision late September, early October, bearing in mind that Broadland was under Housing Corporation supervision in the January we still went live with RSLmanager on the first of April - running the whole business through it, so we delivered in an incredibly fast time scale. It took five months from making the decision to going live and here we are two years later and down time is just 90 minutes now and that is frustrating because two months ago it was zero, but we had a power failure in London which affected the server. Every single member of my staff that has to use a computer turns on RSLmanager every morning. Out of 109 staff, 90 use it every day.
Simon - That’s a much higher proportion than you would get with a traditional system
Michael - When I said I was idealistic, I was. I worked on the premise that you wanted one port of call for everything you might want to do. So it wasn’t just that I wanted to manage our customers through the system, I wanted to manage our properties, I wanted to treat our stakeholders as customers, I wanted to treat suppliers as customers and I also wanted to treat staff as customers. So when we went live there was only one part of the system that we hadn’t planned to develop – the finance module. The HR side was there, the customer side was there, the supplier side was there and the asset management side was there. Then in the December we asked for finance and accounts to be in the system and again we wanted it within a time scale. We wanted to run our year end (in April) through RSLmanager and in four months we did, and it passed audit. So from my point of view, what have I ended up with? I have a real time system for every part of my business. If you ask me a question about my business the likelihood is the answer can be obtained via RSLmanager. So if I want to look at what our Key Performance Indicators are - it is real time information. If I need to know what is going on with our finances I have a real time income expenditure report, a real time nominal ledger, and a real time balance sheet.
Michael - We recently changed our out of hours repairs reporting contract to Invicta in Kent, who have come back and said out of all of the products they have used RSLmanager has been the easiest for them. The other customer group you forget about when you are executive management for an organisation is the non executive, so about 18 months ago we gave access to all of our board members. So as a board member of Broadland you can see what our KPI’s are and we can publish all of the policies that related to our organisation. It’s also got an incorporated intranet so they don’t have to come and ask us for anything, as they can see all they need for themselves.
Simon - There can’t be many organisations that have that at the moment
Michael - I shouldn’t think so. Our board members are part of the team so why keep information from them?
Simon - To go from a prototype which was what you had why Broadland came on board to where you have go to today is a huge amount of development in a very short time. How did you manage that?
Julian - There wasn’t a big development team. There were four main developers who worked on RSLmanager, which was a strength because they were a good team. We also had good support from Broadland, in particular from a couple of people there who worked hard with us to rethink the traditional processes of housing associations with the aim of trying to make them a bit slicker. So the development groups that came back were very efficient and most of the time we got those processes right first time out. I think we were realistic in what we could achieve in that first roll out and we have been continually developing the system since. That’s been around making those processes even more efficient and as more and more people have been using the system we have been able to refine things. For example like the way the contractors and suppliers engage with the system and the way the information is presented back to them – for which we have been getting some really good feedback. Nobody’s expectations were that there was going to be this perfect system on the 1st April. What Broadland needed was to be able to manage customers effectively and that’s what we achieved. There were other issues to manage such as training; some people had never used the internet. But it was team work during those months that enabled everyone to deliver.
Simon - So now you are looking to go from what was a customised system for Broadland to a commercially sellable product, is that difficult?
Mark - We took the decision to build the customer base slowly and we didn’t want to take on another customer until we had Broadland working the way they needed to. So now we have taken on a customer up here in Liverpool, Villages Housing Association. It has been an interesting journey. If you talk to the front line staff on the cash desk who were challenged more than anyone because they weren’t able to run their cash desk in the same way that they use to, they have had their jobs completely reworked, but they are the one group of people who are really happy because they are really getting some efficiency in what they are doing. If you talk to the people in the housing team who are now managing arrears through the system and its nine months on, they are really seeing the benefits of the workflow and alerts tools that increase the efficiency of arrears monitoring and collection. I think it is fair to say that we have learnt that successful implementation is down to a combination of leadership within the organisation and a sustainable training programme. Villages Housing Association have now appointed a dedicated project manager who is supporting the programme of change and the maximisation of the true dynamics of an ebusiness system within day to day operations. They are beginning to understand that the system is only as good as the information that it contains and if they don’t utilise the system workflow the way it has been designed then they won’t get any benefit from it. Their Chief Exec has been very strong from day one and he is keen to work with his management team to ensure they put the effort in and get all staff working with the system.
Simon - Would it be fair to say that your product would only be suited to certain organisations within the sector?
Michael - It would suit any organisation but they have to have an open mindset. What RSLmanager does is challenge the organisation in such a way that all of a sudden everything is very transparent. There is no information being hidden. You could argue that the efficiency work should be driving all RSL’s to systems such as RSLmanager. I think we as a sector probably need to be a more intelligent at looking at outcomes. One of the outcomes has to be compliance, but we can get too bogged down into process and I think we have got legacy processes. You know “we’ve been doing it this way for the last 16 years and therefore ….” An example of that is when we introduced our system, looking at the repairs side, the guys in asset management worked very hard behind the scenes to get Reidmark to change the system back to what they were doing before they used RSLmanager. So we probably wasted 12 months and quite a bit of money to try and redesign the system to exactly what their old system had done. Then after 12 months there was a sudden realisation that they were back to the beginning! So there is a core ingredient in this product which people tend to ignore and that’s called the member of staff concerned. When we had an evaluation of our KPI’s last year by a company called Peter Simon Partners they loved RSLmanager but initially got an amber light because staff were not doing what they were supposed to be doing. You forget that any system is completely reliant on the person sitting at the keyboard. That’s where you have got to go for the real cultural change. You have to change attitudes of the staff. People who have been with organisations a long time become entrenched in routine, they have that spreadsheet on their PC that they haven’t told anyone about and that’s where you hit the barriers. So I think RSLmanager would work for any organisation as long as the organisation is willing to go through the cultural change. I think most RSL’s are going to end up under pressure to find systems similar to what we have got here.
Simon - How did you manage that?
Michael - Badly. I like various change management models but we had the naivety of senior management that if you make a decision over here to go over there that everybody goes from here to there because you have made that decision, and actually that’s not true… everybody goes round here and up there because they go through stages of denial and resistance. We didn’t plan on how much resistance there was going to be to basic change. Whatever change you go through in your life you go into denial. Even if you won the lottery tomorrow, even at that point you would go into immediate denial. Some people then go into resistance, so it’s how can I muck up the system to prove I was right in the first place. Some staff instantly got excited and embraced the system but some staff were stuck in resistance for six or seven months and caused us quite a few problems – in fact it was for that first twelve months. I think the message is that you have got to plan the change management process, you’ve got to plan the introduction and you have got to involve the people. You have to take them through at their pace not your pace. You have got to go through that people process even though you are trying to deliver an IT product. It’s an intelligent product.
Simon - That’s has probably been 10 times more painful than procuring a traditional system
Michael - Well not really from what I found talking to colleagues who have procured traditional systems. I think traditional systems, thinking back to my previous employer, - you go to the same supplier and you ask for the latest system and you implement a few modules. You very rarely introduce a system that covers everybody in the organisation
Simon - So would you say it is worth that additional work to get the additional benefits?
Michael - The benefits completely outweigh that on a very large scale. I think actually we could have reduced most of the pain. I was caught in that position where it would have been nice with hindsight to make the choice in September 2004 and to make the implementation in April 2006 and given ourselves a whole twelve months extra, but the reality was we were the last but one housing association using the then system and support was going to stop in the middle of 2004. We were going to have an unsupported system. In the previous twelve months it had fallen over four times, so what would have happened if it fell over in August 2004 and nobody was willing to repair it for us? So we had a time pressure that few organisations have because few organisations leave it seventeen years between actually introducing new IT systems.
Simon - That brings us to the current situation. You are a customer and are using RSLmanager but you have a special relationship
Michael - We signed a partnering agreement in 2004. Partnering is our preferred methodology with all of our key contractors. We have partnering agreements with our lawyers, our training and development guys and construction side and therefore by definition we are partners in this product. We are a user and we write cheques to them but we have to work in partnership or we won’t have the right product and it won’t be sustainable for Reidmark to be developing the right product for us. So I wouldn’t say it’s a special relationship I think it’s a natural ongoing relationship between key organisations that depend upon each other.
Simon - Is it different to the relationship that Reidmark will have with future customers?
Mark - Yes. We do like to work in partnership but I think we are lucky working with Michael because we share the same vision of where you can take systems within housing. That’s not to say we won’t work with someone else with a similar view but because the product is a prototype and because Broadland have come on the journey with us to get it to where it is now any new user will see it as a system that they can take, they might need modifications to it – to help customise it to suit their specific environment, but the broad processes are established now. So I think it will be different - but we will still develop ongoing relationships with our clients and see them as partners, rather than one off customers. I think what our relationship did help drive, is reinforcement – to both parties that we had made the right decision with RSLmanager. Within four months of it going live we were short listed for a significant award, the Information Management Awards. RSLmanager won the category for business intelligence and knowledge management and that was something really powerful that Michael could take back to the Association, which reinforced that fact that he had made the right decision. We were also runner up in the product of the year category.
Simon - You said earlier you made a conscious decision to grow slowly, where does it put you now on that growing curve? Technology wise, is it hosted here or at the customer site?
Julian - It can be hosted anywhere. But what we offer people from day one is this hosted application so all you need is a PC and an internet connection. If you want to host it internally you can we give you the software and away you go. A lot of organisations we talk to now, even outside of the sector, don’t want that.
Simon - What technology is it based on?
Julian - ASP.net.
Can you tell me a bit more about the claim that this is the first truly integrated system on the market? That’s a bold thing to say when other suppliers say they have integrated systems
Mark - And they probably do up to a point. I suppose it is to do with your definition of integration. You can have two products side by side that are integrated. Our claim is based on that we took the decision to embrace the whole organisation and have it operating within that single system. We looked at all of the different bolt on products that people might use having gone with a more traditional approach. Some things sit outside but all of the primary functions of the housing association are in there. If you look at hand held solutions. People go out and do their stock condition survey and come back and load it in. What we do is provide a system which is automatically mobile. The difference is when you go out and do a stock condition survey all you are doing is calculating the order for the contractor so before you have even left the property the order has gone to the contractor and they are onto the job. So we are trying to speed up that communication flow. When we sell it to you, you get everything.
Michael - Talking about everything, you are not just talking about housing, where you have the repairs, arrears and allocations but you have things like finance, HR, and mobile working. The big area of administration is on the accountancy side, all other systems use an accountancy package, I am not aware of any other system that has a package based on the main technology of the system. I think that made a difference to Broadland. As soon as you take some rent over the counter, upload housing benefit information or commission a repair, that data is immediately available. So from my point of view it is an integrated system because it is the only system you need to use. If the government decided next week they wanted to do something new using housing associations to deliver it in five months time, then that can be accommodated for within the system as well.
Simon - That’s an unconventional relationship with a supplier; you are not just dependant on the supplier for the housing system, its putting all of your eggs in one basket.
Michael - Yes and you could argue that that is a risk. What is our risk? The first risk is down time. In the last two years that has only been 90 minutes, over the entire two years and that was due to a power failure in London. The other risk is that Reidmark stop developing the system, well if they stopped developing it any further you still have got a whole system and it will still work. What you haven’t got is the risk of systems not talking to each other or one of your systems failing and it’s a bit of software on your server.
Simon - With it being hosted by the provider you must have a lot smaller kit requirement with regards to your server room etc?
Michael - There are quite a lot of efficiency gains on the IT side such as a reduction in the size of the IT department.
Simon - So Michael, Broadland have been in supervision and come out of supervision you must be on an upper curve as an organisation. Would you attribute some of that success to the system you now have.
Michael - Absolutely. A lot of it. Actually we were inspected in October by the Audit Commission and their inspectors are saying we could not have achieved all of this without RSLmanager.
Julian - They made some good suggestions about taking the system forward as well.
Simon - You have had a flexible relationship with Broadland but I can’t see you can do that for everybody. What will be your approach in delivering the system to new future customers?
Mark - There is an element of flexibility in there, certainly, who accesses the system, what buttons need to be pressed, that sort of stuff. That’s all within the client control so they can determine work flow and who it goes to. There’s flexibility in their system set up anyway. Because of the type of system it is, it is very flexible. Certainly with Villages we have not dismissed any of their suggestions for change. What we have asked them to do is give it a reasonable period of time to evaluate that possible change with us and if at the end of that you still want to change then yes we will sit down and look at the system and that way of working. We did that with the accountancy system. We don’t prevent people from changing the system but we ask them to give it a go as it stands first. If the organisation trusts what the system is doing then that helps. If you come from an environment of using access and excel which is looking at data, where as what we are presenting is that data being manipulated and being delivered back to you. Our second customer has been hard in that respect as they didn’t have a previous system, so they did have that “closeness” to spreadsheets.
Simon - How did you get the Villages, was it unconventional like Broadland?
Mark - No we went through traditional procurement and they decided to go with us because they did actually want something different. From talking to them they and their Chief Exec they are really happy with the system, they are pleased to have a system that is flexible and not one that forces them down paths that they don’t want to go. The facts speak for themselves. Because there are a number of suppliers and we are going head to head with them but not on the same product. The whole idea of workflow and dynamic dashboards and driving information at the right time - we take it for granted because that’s what the system can do. I think sometime it can be a little overwhelming for people that there is so much functionality from day one; they almost think it is a bit too good to be true.
Simon - You have not had much publicity to raise your profile, has that been deliberate.
Mark - Yes. The last thing we wanted to do was take the product to market in a very loud big way and not be happy ourselves that it was doing everything we wanted it to do, that we aspired for it to do. That’s happened now and with the neighbourhood module coming on we are more than ready for the market
Simon - Your ethos seems to have been focussed on customer care and being very flexible. If in 5 years time you have 30 RSL customers are you not going to be just another supplier with another system?
Mark - Hopefully not. From a personal point of view I think we have always, as a company, come up with something extra that makes us just that little bit different. As long as we remain fit as a company and we understand what we can do with the technology we will always come up with ways in which to distinguish ourselves. In terms of our customer service I believe we give our customers a top field service, we have always managed to pick up customers who share our vision. We have an interesting challenge which is whether we continue to grow the RSL customer base or whether we work with a possible new entrant into the market. As a company we would not want to grow to the extent where we couldn’t do what we still want to do because what we do now makes us the type of company we all want to be working with
Simon - I can see some of the cash rich corporate giants wanting to buy RSLmanager, would you sell out?
Mark - What we do is build good quality software, that’s what we enjoy doing. If we in the future found a partner who wanted to take on RSLmanager then we would clearly talk about it and we have already made provision for that with Broadland. We have done some business planning around what would happen to existing customers. I think if you talk to some of those suppliers I think they think they already have the same sort of product as RSLmanager but the difference is we had a clean sheet of paper and we took all of the processes and looked at how we could make them better, more efficient. We are not taking a five year old system and trying to drag it forward, so I think that’s where we are different. Yes the next couple of years will be interesting and a lot of that will depend on our next customer. The crazy thing is we have more product acceptance in Australia than we do in our own country which is quite something really. We are looking at partnering with an Australian supplier. It will be interesting to see what happens, we are very open minded.
Simon - Talk us through your short, medium and long term plans
Mark - In terms of customer three we are talking to a variety of different organisations. We are getting confirmation that we still suffer, like a lot of companies, from being tucked up in Liverpool which makes it more complex dealing with companies in the south. So we are exploring ways in which we can open ourselves up a bit more through repositioning the company with perhaps a sales presence in London. I think there is only a certain part of the RSL market that is the fit for Reidmark so we are going through quite a thorough investigation at the moment in terms of identifying who they are and most certainly stepping up our presence at events. We have been in the background for the last two or three years getting the product right so I think you will see a different Reidmark at Harrogate next year. We have also been approached by organisations who need this type of system but a slightly different version of it, so we are currently looking at this too.
Simon - I have covered everything on my list, is there anything else you would like to add?
Mark - Can we just mention IAGmanager that we provide to the Learning Skills Council and the awards we have won for that product? I mentioned earlier about the Information Management Awards and RSLmanager. Last year IAGmanager came runner up in the Information Management awards too and this year we have been announced as finalists in the British Computer Society Awards – so in December at the Grosvenor we will be receiving some form of award – in the social contribution category. This will be the third year running that we have managed an awards achievement. Last year we were up against Microsoft, Marks and Spencer and Barclays so it is quite an accomplishment and also a good night at the Grosvenor. Our profile is a lot higher in other markets.
The other thing I would like to mention is about the neighbourhood management module, the latest development work around RSLmanager. The plan is to run a couple of seminars where we will show people how running an e-business system can deliver real time immediate information. So to get across to people that within the neighbourhood module it isn’t just about asset management, there is all of this soft information that can be brought in so that you can make other important decisions. It is about understanding more about your customers, joining up those lines between rent arrears, service complaints and planned maintenance programming. It is about saying are we delivering the business plan, or indeed is the business plan the right business plan? We want to demonstrate how management knowledge drives business intelligence. So rather than doing a product demonstration, it is more about how to get the most out of your information you are collecting on your system. The first of these seminars will be taking place in one of the executive meeting rooms on the Thursday of the Social Housing Exhibition, being held at the ICC in September.