Tech Success: Making Remote Working Work

In the summer of 2012, TechWeekEurope launched the Tech Success Awards to celebrate IT projects that exceeded expectations and made a real difference.

Now, it is time to find out more about the winners. The final award for the most successful mobility IT project of 2011-2012 went to the social housing provider Stockport Homes, for equipping its housing officers responsible for Current Tenant Visits (CTV) with Android tablets and a specialised app. As a result, the time it takes to make a CTV was cut in half, while the quality of collected data increased considerably.

Working with Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council and mobile app developer CommonTime, Stockport Homes had a working prototype of the application delivered in less than 60 days.

Registration for this year’s Tech Success Awards is open, and we have added an extra category for security projects. So if your business has recently accomplished a feat of IT engineering, we want to know!

Out in the field

Stockport Homes was founded in 2005 as an Arm’s Length Management Organisation (ALMO), created specifically to manage social housing in the area. While the local Council owns Stockport Homes, it is operated independently on a day-to-day basis.

Every two years, social housing tenants get a CTV, to discuss their living arrangements and proactively identify any housing or support needs. Stockport Homes plans around 5000 such visits a year.

In early 2012, the organisation developed a project to mobilise the CTV process. Previously, its 25 housing officers had to prepare for each visit in advance, pull the information about a customer from a database, print it, and enter additional details once they were back in the office.

On request of Stockport Homes, CommonTime developed a mobile application that enabled the organisation’s staff to access customer information remotely and complete the entire CTV process out in the field. The software can present information in an offline mode, securely synchronise to the office systems on-demand, and then remove all data from the device to main security.

As a result, the time it takes to make a CTV was cut down by 50 percent, while the quality of information and customer satisfaction increased. The success of the pilot has encouraged Stockport Homes to look at mobile solutions in other areas of its business, such as estate inspections, income management and reporting repairs.

We congratulate the team at Stockport Homes on their Tech Success!

You can read about Tech Success winners in other categories:

• The most successful public sector IT project: Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust
• The most successful cloud project: Orbian
• The most innovative IT project: Jaguar Land Rover
• The most successful “green” IT project: Cadoxton Primary School

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