Positioning ICT for Business
Efficiency & Growth
Richard Scholes
ICT Director
February 2014
Fast Facts about The Hyde Group
£260m
turnover
49,000
£260m
homes
turnover
£2.9bn
assets
1,250
staff
95,000
Residents
46 years
old
The Hyde Group is one of the UK’s leading and
award winning providers of housing
Hyde’s Geography
About Me
• Experienced IT Leader
• 7 Years in the housing sector
• Multi-sector experience
Change Enables Growth?
Hyde’s strategic
objectives
include growth
and efficiency
targets
Change
is
good!
Value for the
sector
Change is the
only constant in
life
Being more
efficient improves
customer
satisfaction and
our growth
aspirations
But change
needs structure
The Scale of Change at Hyde
To support
our growth
objectives
we needed to
become
more
efficient as a
business
To become
more
efficient
we needed
to change
The change
programme
at Hyde
touched
every part
of our
business
Split into 3
phases to
make it
manageable
and assure
successful
delivery
Targeted
the most
needy
areas
first
Has taken
3+ years
to deliver
ONE HYDE ONE VISION (OHOV)
Hyde’s Change Journey – Phase 1
Went live July 2010
Centralised call centre for repairs and general enquiries
Redesign and upgrade of our telecoms infrastructure to
support the new call centre functionality along with
improvements to address business continuity
Significant investment in the development of our Microsoft
Dynamics based CRM application, TED
Centralisation of resident services
Hyde’s Change Journey – Phase 2
Went live May 2012
Targeted local resident services and included an operational
restructure into 3 new regions, London, South & East
Resulted in the standardisation of roles across the business
Review and reshaping of Corporate Services to give the
business the support services it needs to be as
efficient as possible
Hyde’s Change Journey – Phase 3
Went live October 2013
Targeted repairs and property services
Led to the re-procurement of repairs and maintenance
contracts
Will save us £50m over 10 years
The number of repairs and maintenance
contractors reduced from 60+ to 14
So, Hyde in Summary
Large
Organisation
Geographically
dispersed
In need of
first class
support
services
Committed to
growth
Needed to
fundamentally
change the way
of doing things
How did the Business change to
Support Growth?
Corporate Services Review
New Directorate for Hyde
ICT
Risk &
Compliance
Facilities
Procurement
Company
Secretariat
ICT Restructure – where we were
Structure had
evolved over time
Confusing for
users
Unclear
responsibilities
Duplication of
effort
Silo working
No centralised
support
In summary, not
fit for purpose for
our new world
ICT Restructure – what we did
Got some help
Looked at our
requirements
from the ground
up
Designed our tobe structure
Created 3 clearly
focussed teams
Looked at
resourcing levels
Designed out
duplication
Got the right
people in the
right jobs
Re-formulated
role profiles
Ensured
managers could
manage –
assessment
centres
ICT Restructure – what we did
Outsourced
some
functions
Became more
efficient –
reduced
headcount
Designed in
flexibility
New Structure
Support
Strategy
Projects &
Change
And while all this was going on…
…we were re-defining the ICT Strategy to
support those growth ambitions
ICT Strategy
• Get closer to the Business
• Good governance
• Fix our data
• Target Value for Money
• Review and deploy the right technology
• Review everything
• Document everything
• Implement ITIL principles
• Implement TOGAF principles
• ICT Roadmap
• Continuous Improvement
• Sell the vision
Why Outsource?
• Looked at the service we needed to deliver
• Looked at options:
• To improve service
• To reduce risk
• To increase Value for Money
• Concluded that there were two areas where outsourcing should
be considered:
 Software support and development
where we lacked the internal skills
 Telecoms – to mitigate risk
Why Network & Telecoms?
Contract with BT was up for renewal
Run internally by a small team
 Networks
 IP telephony
 Call Centre
All expertise in one place
Decided to spread the risk
 Outsource the function
 TUPE the staff to the new supplier
Why some software and not all?
In 2010/11 we developed our CRM application TED as a key component of
our business change programme One Hyde One Vision (OHOV)
Microsoft Dynamics base
Outsource option for support and
future development:
Biztalk interfaces to Northgate
Housing and Serengeti DMS
• Quicker to implement
• Better VFM – about £350k p.a.
cheaper
Built by a team of contract
resource
Cost of recruiting a permanent
team with the skills to support
and develop were prohibitive circa 10 FTE needed
In other areas such as the
support of Northgate Housing we
already have a team of experts
• Considered it to be more risky
to outsource than keep in
house
Why fix the data?
How data chaos affect the Business &
ICT Jointly
Pain Point
Data manually assembled and reconciled from various sources for enterprise reporting
Poor data architecture documentation increasing integration complexity and project
timelines
Data not synchronized across applications, so data conflicts across systems
Duplicate records in the same source system creating integration and reporting issues
Manually re-keying data is causing data quality issues
Manually re-keying data is wasting resource time
Paying for extra application licenses so users can view key data
Performing multiple replications, cleansing and transformation of the same data
Poor access to data residing in applications with a limited number of licenses, for
example Business Objects
ICT
Feels it
Business
Feels it
Systems Review
Looked at all
of our
systems
Looked at
the fit for our
business
Reviewed
interfaces
Created our Systems Catalog
Identified
business
ownership
Good Governance
You will need a
proper process for
Business change
approval
Needs to include
the people who
can say “yes”
It should cover
funds approval
Clearly defined
deliverables
Look at Total Cost
of Ownership
Insist on proper
Project Mgt. &
PMO
ITIL
Industry standard
Fitted with our new structure
Assures service
Controlled change and incident
management
Mandatory for all ICT staff and 3rd party
suppliers
TOGAF
Industry standard
Assures that our enterprise architecture
is:
 Well designed
 Properly planned
 Well implemented
 Properly governed
In other words, it works
ICT Roadmap
Gives clarity to the direction of travel
A useful tool in budget planning
Helps inform business cases and secure
funds
Assists in the prioritisation of workload
Continuous Improvement
Business partnering
Get out and about in the business
Engage the main influencers
Network
Sell the vision
In Summary
Growth comes
from a solid base
You need to have
the right support
structures in place
You need to be
brave
Don’t underestimate
the effort and time
needed to change
effectively
You need to
believe in what
you are doing
Communicate –
people don’t like
surprises