in process efficiency
in duplicate contact data
consolidated into to one secure database
Hackney Council manages the tenures, safety and maintenance of over 30,000 homes across East London.
Replacing their legacy system was escalated when Hackney Council suffered a serious cyber-attack in October 2020. The attack meant that staff were no longer able to use their system to book repairs, manage housing finance and administrate their tenants & leaseholders.
Hackney swiftly put emergency interim procedures in place so that they could manage their housing stock of over 30,000 homes. During this time, Hackney’s Housing Services teams were also working hard to support their vulnerable residents and prioritise wellbeing initiatives where they were most needed in their community during the pandemic.
Hackney Council expedited the need to deliver a frictionless tenant and leaseholder management system that would free up time for their housing officers to prioritise the safety, security and welfare of their tenants. The programme of work was separated out into three workstreams including Repairs Hub, Finance and Managing and Tenants & Leaseholders that would need to work together to deliver a seamless staff and resident experience.
Ensono Digital are delivering a secure tenant & leaseholder management system 'Manage my Home', to free up time that for housing officers to spend with their tenants.
For consistency and data quality, Ensono Digital worked with the Hackney Enterprise Architect to create programme-level test and architecture strategies to ensure the three workstreams could collaborate effectively across data sets.
Ensono Digital also introduced several new concepts such as event driven architecture and micro frontends, designed for scalability and re-usability. In addition to this, Ensono Digital introduced the concept of creating shared code libraries (using Nuget packages) to allow Hackney to create reusable code components across their codebase.
Working closely with departments across Hackney Council, Ensono Digital's data engineers consolidated and restructured recovered data from Universal Housing and numerous interim spreadsheets, to produce one clean and reliable data set to migrate to the new system. This provides a single source of truth of Hackney person, tenure and property data alongside a powerful and easily searchable system.
Future data quality was a strategic focus for Hackney, so Ensono Digital set up meetups for data, technical architecture and front-end development for Hackney and agency teams. This not only helped to shape the project as it progressed, but also provided a platform to communicate what had been achieved and promote 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.
Built with best practise, Hackney now have sustainable APIs that can be re-used to advance the modernisation of other Council departments.
Throughout the delivery, Ensono Digital worked with a ‘supergroup’ of 11 Hackney Council housing officers who champion the views of the people at the heart of the system and provide regular user feedback on early designs. Their invaluable collaboration has ensured that the platform is serving the needs of its day-to-day users.
Ensono Digital are also working with the supergroup to document process flows for 62+ existing processes that will be rebuilt in the new system. In doing so, the joint team are challenging and identifying where efficiencies can be made, reducing the number of steps and actors and automating as many tasks as possible. This is an ongoing project, but so far, Ensono Digital have reduced the complexity of the processes by 40%.
Hackney Council now have an exceptionally responsive and secure foundation that can be managed and built upon to offer further time saving digitisation in the future, including tenant-self-service.
To support Hackney Councils effort to provide a single source of truth, Ensono Digital data engineers have consolidated 15 disparate data sources into one clean and secure database. This has reduced person data duplications by ~16% and contact detail duplications by ~37%.
Ensono Digital are working closely with Hackney Council to substantially reduce the complexity of their processes by ~40%. This is paving the way for better automation, efficiency and time saving for housing officers to spend on higher value tasks.