Housing provider A2Dominion finds the key to better data management

A2Dominion provides more than 33,000 homes across London and southern England

A UK housing provider has made improvements to the management of its data by enlisting the help of data management solutions provider DataFlux.

The A2Dominion Group, the result of a merger between housing agencies A2 and Dominion, provides more than 33,000 homes across London and southern England and is in the process of building thousands more.

The group offers rented, temporary, student, sheltered, supported and key worker accommodation, as well as homes for sale and shared ownership.

When the two agencies merged, a major challenge for the newly formed A2Dominion Group concerned the collation and management of all its data – including information around property type, number of bedrooms, location, business stream and postcode data.

The group decided to use DataFlux’s software to create a single Universal Housing database, which consisted of data migrated from four separate databases: two sets of data from A2 and two from Dominion.

DataFlux’s Data Management Platform lets end users assemble data from a variety of sources, such as those housed in an SAP solution or a Microsoft database, and uses the same data for all business processes, thereby ensuring consistency of data throughout the firm.

The Universal Housing database also contains customer and tenant information, such as rent account history and transactions. This data is fully integrated with and supplied to A2Dominion’s CRM and call centre systems.

“DataFlux’s software has a set of rules in place that it uses to validate data attributes, and it will automatically correct or highlight corrections in inconsistent data,” said Andrew Boyes, group director of information systems at A2Dominion.

“It’s very easy to use. In the space of about four or five days you could become an expert in using the tool,” he added.

Boyes claims that the other data management solutions available on the market are usually much more complicated and require the user to be very knowledgeable in IT.

Creating a data management quality culture

In the initial phase of A2Dominion’s project, the group will profile data held in its Universal Housing database to identify areas where improvements in data quality will yield the highest value. The group plans to use those results to foster a culture among staff that will focus on data quality, and the group hopes that this will help the organisation create and maintain a single set of data standards.

The group also hopes to improve its communication with tenants and customers and revealed that it will implement a continuous data quality audit programme to provide trustworthy, real-time data, which it says is the foundation for better customer service.

“When data management is taken seriously at the top level of an organisation, the trickle-down effects are amplified,” said Colin Rickard, managing director EMEA at DataFlux.

“By making a concerted effort to entrench a data quality ethos within the group, A2Dominion is taking a proactive and governed approach that turns data into a strategic asset.”