The social housing sector faces widespread issues around the use of ageing and highly customised systems. This legacy technology creates challenges of inefficiency and cybersecurity risk. In this article, we’ll explore the impact of legacy technology on the social housing sector and how to address it.
What do I need to know about legacy technology?
Legacy technology is a term used to describe systems which are outdated but still in use – they can be difficult to change or are unsupported, and generally do not allow the business to grow or do things differently. This can also include systems which have been incrementally built over time, creating a highly customised but undocumented solution which nobody fully understands. In the social housing sector, these are prevalent issues due to the lower prioritisation of funding for technology vs other needs.
What’s the link to cyber security?
Legacy technology lacks the latest security features and updates. This makes it like an open invitation for cyber trouble! Without the latest security updates, cybercriminals can exploit these unaddressed vulnerabilities to gain unauthorised access to sensitive data and financial records. This can lead to identity theft, fraud, and reputational damage.
Housing associations are often dealing with lots of personal information relating to vulnerable people, making them a prime target for cybercriminals. There have been a number of high-profile reported incidents affecting the sector over the past few years.
What are the other considerations?
Where legacy technology prevails, we often see gaps in the organisation with business processes not being covered by technology and a lack of automation. That means lots of manual workarounds, supported by off-system paper-based (or spreadsheet-based) processes. Not only does this slow things down, these processes are prone to error and heavily reliant on individual knowledge. If key individuals are unavailable, processes grind to a halt. This may feel familiar to you……
This also compounds the issues of reporting and having single versions of the truth. If data resides in many different places (including heads!), generating management information becomes labour intensive and this inherently creates delay, impacting the timeliness and quality of decisions. Making an effective transition to Net Zero and meeting other ESG objectives will be difficult in this context.
So what’s the answer?
The social housing sector is not unique in its challenges. Tackling the legacy technology issue is difficult, but maintaining the status quo is rarely the right long-term answer.
Addressing legacy challenges is not just about swapping one bit of technology for another; it's about flipping the whole script on how you do business. Treat it like a business makeover, not just an IT project. The aim should be to modernise your operations and provide better experiences for staff and tenants alike.
The best approach involves looking at your current business capabilities and technology holistically – understanding what your business and technology can and needs to do – and then pick, deploy, and integrate new solutions from this baseline. We also advocate looking ahead to anticipate your needs (such as ESG trends) and future business strategy, and don’t just focus on today. This is a long journey to embark on, but with a solid technology plan you are on the road to improved efficiency, better security, and a capability that can grow with you.
Lastly, don’t forget the people. The start of any change requires committed and aligned leadership, with a clear purpose on where you are heading and why. It’s critical to get your organisation behind any change of this nature so they an input on the approach and benefit from its outcomes.
