Every organisation is complex. Everyone acknowledges that when you have operations involving multiple clients and systems and have to adhere to regulations and legislation, there’s always added complexity.  

For example, whilst every housing association aspires to have a single master system that will act as a central database managing every aspect of your relationship with tenants, payments, properties, repairs, etc. The reality is that, over the years, specialist niche business applications have emerged that are required for the day-to-day running of the organisation but don’t fit into the setup you already have in place, fragmenting that single source of truth dataset.   

To begin with, it’s just one or two additional business applications that are added out of necessity. Then legislation changes, and you have to add a new application to the mix to be compliant. Two years later, you transfer all this data to a new version of this application with more capabilities, but continue to run a couple of workflows through the old application. 

Very quickly, before you consciously know it, you can end up with this mass of applications, and application sprawl has taken hold, and you have no way of seeing the wood for the trees. 

This happens across all sectors, but our experience in social housing has shown it occurs very often. 

Many applications exist in the social housing sector because they are legally required, such as fire safety systems and electrical certification systems (to name just two). These manage obligations to ensure that those things are all tested, up to date, and compliant. Both applications contain elements of every customer’s record, but the information they hold on the fire safety systems or electrical certifications is all exclusive to each app. That’s where the applications then form this data legacy. However, that is another post in its entirety!  

Having your organisation spread across multiple business applications isn’t a bad thing, and don’t get us wrong, sometimes it just has to be that way. However, issues arise when the organisation wants to obtain reporting information and start asking questions such as “How are we performing in relation to our fire safety or boiler service checks?” and “How is this particular service performing compared to a previous period?” If all this information is spread across multiple applications, it makes retrieving it more inefficient, costing your organisation time and money on many levels. Having the governance controls to make the right decision here is critical, and consciously having an application alternative rather than just falling into another system choice.  

The answer to new applications can’t always be no. There might be a genuine business reason for this additional application, such as a new compliance requirement, and the functionality simply does not exist in the main housing management system. Nobody sets out to create application sprawl; it just gradually happens.

If application sprawl is causing inefficiencies in your organisation, please get in touch. Our team is here to help you cut through the clutter and work out an application rationalisation plan through an application review and enable you to reduce that application and data overlap and improve your reporting.