The Business Case For Open Data (Part 5) – The Pillars of Open Data Strategy

The social housing sector has an enviable purpose: Providing homes that improve the lives of our customers and their communities, now and for generations to come. We can make a positive difference by operating efficiently and investing prudently, by having sustainable and resilient organisations that put the customer, our tenants, at the heart of everything they do.

Open Data strategy aligns directly with this purpose as its values should focus on customers, be results driven, ethical, innovative and collaborative, with the social housing sector coming together as one team.

Drawing inspiration from successful open data initiatives in other sectors, some of the key pillars of the strategy are:

COLLABORATION - This will allow the social housing sector as a whole to collectively learn faster and increase interoperability to support a broader approach to solving some of our shared and national challenges.

MAKE IT EASY – Ensuring that appropriate data is published openly in an easy-to-consume way, supporting and encouraging those who might use it and encouraging citizen scientists (research conducted with participation from the general public or amateur researchers to support social science, services and performance improvement). We must endeavour to simplify data that is technical and complex because, as is the case for all open data, it will be published under an open licence, making it free to use.

OUTCOME FOCUSED – Effort must be focused on improving the lives of our customers and supporting the communities they live in, helping to tackle local issues that our customers tell us they care about as well as national ones that require us to come together with others to solve.

COLLABORATE WITH OTHER SECTORS – There is the opportunity to collaborate not just amongst ourselves, but with other sectors, such as contractors and the energy sector, to help for example accelerate the move to net zero and enabling better cross-sector outcomes for customers. We can work symbiotically to decrease demand and stress on scarce resources such as people and skills.

BUILD AN ECOSYSTEM – Open Data can help to create a vibrant local ecosystem, promoting citizen science and building valuable skills. It has the potential to strengthen our existing partnerships, suppliers and stakeholders and forge new ones both locally and nationally. It supports innovation and helps the growth of data re-users and innovators through supporting and promoting citizen science. It can support educational organisations to both bring diverse talent into the sector and build valuable skills in our regions.

STRENGTHEN OUR CAPABILITY – Better use of data allows us to better enable people, process, and technology solutions, including emerging technology such as AI. We need to make sure Open Data is considered business as usual and is easy to execute on.

TRUST – Lastly, but importantly, we need to ensure we continually increase the trust in and value of our data. Open data and transparency builds trust with our customers, stakeholders and our data-reuser communities. Based on so many recent reports, trust in social housing providers is a value we have to restore.