By Deborah Grieve, Senior Consultant and Delivery Manager, Ensono Digital Gareth Cozens, Lead Consultant, Ensono Digital
How one organization used an unforeseen challenge as a catalyst to deliver better human experiences.
We may be technologists, but in our minds the best technology stories aren’t really about tech at all. They’re about people. The real human beings on the receiving end of great technological vision, innovation and collaboration, and the ways their lives are positively, often profoundly impacted when that vision is realized.
Hackney Council is a local government authority and social housing provider in the UK with the noble mission of prioritizing the safety, security and welfare of the tenants who reside in their 30,000 East London houses. The housing officers who execute this mission have a high-touch role that involves spending time with residents, getting to know them, listening, observing, and tuning into indications of need or distress. In October 2020, this mission was jeopardized when the organization’s Universal Housing management system was affected by a serious cyberattack. In an instant, staff found themselves unable to perform the critical administrative functions that were also part of their job and impacted tenants’ day-to-day lives—things like booking repairs and managing housing finances.
It couldn’t have happened at a worse moment. The attack occurred while the world was in the grips of the pandemic and still months away from a vaccine, a time when housing officers were intensely focused on supporting the safety, health and well-being of already-vulnerable community members. Emergency procedures were put in place in the wake of the attack that enabled officers to resume their admin operations, but in a highly manual way which raised concerns of duplication and human error.
Hackney Council had already been looking at replacing their legacy system in order to improve their tenants’ and staff’s digital experience when the attack hit. Suddenly, the nice-to-have new platform they’d been contemplating became a must-have-NOW.
Hackney Council enterprise architects partnered with cloud-native consultancy Ensono Digital to build a simplified, flexible platform that would streamline back-end processes, enable residents to self-serve wherever possible, and enable Housing Officers to focus their time on vulnerable residents who needed more support.
The team separated the program of work into three workstreams—Repairs Hub, Finance & Managing, and Tenants & Leaseholders—and created program-level test and architecture strategies that ensured the workstreams could collaborate effectively across multiple data sets. Ensono Digital focused of the Tenants & Leaseholders workstream and also introduced several new concepts, including:
Event-driven architecture and micro front ends that permit reusability and scalability
Shared code libraries (using NuGet packages) that would give Hackney Council reusable code components that they could leverage across their codebase
Working closely with departments across Hackney Council, the data engineering team consolidated and restructured recovered data from Universal Housing and numerous interim spreadsheets to produce one clean, reliable data set. This now provides a single source of truth of the Hackney Council resident, tenure and property data alongside a powerful and easily searchable system.
Future data quality was a strategic focus for Hackney Council, so Ensono Digital then set up multiple front-end development meetups, and also attended numerous technical architecture meetups with agency teams. This helped to shape the project as it progressed, provided a platform to communicate what had been achieved, and promoted knowledge sharing on how to maintain good practices.
Combined with the event-driven architecture, the dependent systems now automatically sync data in real time to help maintain a clean database, ensuring data is designed for retrieval and APIs are highly responsive. Hackney Council now has sustainable APIs that can be reused to advance the modernization of other departments.
From the start of the project, Hackney Council’s primary focus was people—the residents of their homes, and those who care for and support them. Ensuring the new platform would serve the true needs of all its day-to-day users was of paramount importance, so the team worked in close collaboration with a “super group” of 11 Hackney Council housing officers who championed the views of the people at the heart of the system and provided regular user feedback on early designs.
And Ensono Digital is just getting started! The team is working with the super group to reengineer more than 62 existing processes in the new system, starting with “Sole-to-Joint Application” and “Succession.” In doing so, the Joint team is challenging and identifying where efficiencies can be made, reducing the number
of steps and actors and automating as many tasks as possible. Cate McLaurin, Head of Delivery for Hackney Council, put it simply, “By implementing new technologies, we’re able to drive operational efficiencies, cost savings and deliver a better user experience.”
This collaboration has paid off. With the new system in place, administrative demands on housing officers have been greatly reduced—to date, process efficiency has increased by 40% and duplicate content data has gone down by 37%. Housing Officers are now able to dedicate more of their time to the critical work they have been called and trained to do. Innovative solutions. True partnership. People-focused outcomes. Now that’s a technology story we'll never get tired of sharing.\\
