Get with the program

In this age of austerity and localism, reliable information is going to be a must-have commodity for any social landlord looking to meet the ever-growing list of challenges with fewer resources. Technology has a crucial role to play, but its implementation must be about more than gadgets and gizmos – it’s about people too. Mark Cantrell reports

Information, as the old adage goes, is power. It also means freedom: in the sense of being empowered to make an informed choice. This is as relevant for social landlords looking to empower tenants and communities, as it is for the Government’s localism agenda looking to empower electorates. Indeed in many respects the two inevitably dovetail.

Both, after all, aim to open up decisions to local scrutiny and input in an effort to invigorate the country’s democratic structures and processes, be they local or national, just as much as forge a partnership between landlord and tenant to help improve the delivery of services. It’s the same principle applied to different – but not entirely dissimilar – relationships.

All this might not seem to have much of anything to do with the IT department’s – or the IT supplier’s – remit. On the face of it, they don’t, until one considers how information and communication technology (ICT) has come to exert such a pervasive role in modern life.

The Audit Commission invited the sector to consider just these issues with the publication of a discussion paper earlier this year. ‘The truth is out there’ invited public sector bodies, such as local authorities, police, health trusts, and – of course – social landlords to ponder what kind of information might capture the public’s imagination and also, perhaps more crucially given how today we live amidst a deluge of competing and at times conflicting information, it asks how will the public know what information to trust?

“Web technology has made ours an information and communication age. More people than ever before regularly access the internet, use social networking sites, and buy their goods and services online. Technology is helping people to decide how to live their lives, from planning their travel to choosing schools or hospital treatments,” said Steve Bundred, then chief executive of the Audit Commission.

“Making information available online can do more than help people make choices about using public services. It can enhance democracy by giving people more of a voice. If we know what decisions our councillors or MPs are facing, what they are spending taxes on, and what the results are, we can hold politicians and public servants to account, identify waste and even expose corruption

“But this will work only if the information in the public domain is accurate, understandable and trustworthy. If it is not, poor decisions will be made and trust in public debate further eroded. Not all of the information in the public domain yet meets those standards. If the benefits of transparency are to be realised, it needs to.”

These were topical concerns at the time, pre-election; they are all the more so today. With the new Government’s localism agenda, its demands for transparency leading to the publication of public sector expenses and pay, its austerity measures for public spending, and of course the implications for tenant empowerment in the aftermath of the TSA’s abolition, the demands faced by organisations to gather, compile and present information effectively has vastly increased.

Consequently, the pressure is on to ensure that the information presented to tenants is accurate, reliable – and digestible in the sense that it is meaningful to the layperson. Without such trustworthy information, then the tenants won’t be in a position to make meaningful choices, or have any meaningful insight or say into the activities of their landlord. Get it right and IT can exert a profoundly empowering role; get it wrong and it has the potential to mystify and irritate.

Poor information supplied to customers does not have to signify some intent to keep them ‘in the dark’; it may simply reflect a lack of ‘self-awareness’ by the organisation itself. This is the flipside of this IT -enhanced information age. An earlier Audit Commission ‘thought exercise’ – ‘Nothing but the truth’ – explored this aspect when it asked the sector to contemplate the reliability of the facts and figures public bodies use themselves internally.

It isn’t just the public who need reliable information; the same is true of managers and front-line staff. Think of the degree of KPIs required of a modern social landlord, not to mention the data gathering, storage, and the number crunching required to generate reliable reports able to seriously and genuinely inform corporate decision-making and forward planning. So getting the IT infrastructure right is absolutely critical – and it isn’t simply a matter of the hardware and software combinations.

Technology is not a thing in itself, but a tool. That said, as anyone knows from the consumer gadgets that proliferate in daily life, there is a faddish tendency for all the gizmos, dongles and devices to become fetishised into short-lived must haves. There is a huge degree of crossover from everyday life to working life – PCs are as much entertainment systems as they are business machines; ideal games platforms as much as spreadsheet number crunchers – meaning that those tasked to use technology in working life are not entirely immune from these tendencies.

As a tool – or more aptly an entire workshop of toolboxes – IT , whether it’s the hardware and software components, form part of overall systems, procedures and, in effect, the human interactions that make any business operate effectively. In the end, archetypal techno-nerds aside, IT is about people not technology.

With the right technological infrastructure people – staff, managers and customers alike – can be empowered; get it wrong and in this austere age the consequences don’t bear thinking about.