Notting Hill Genesis — Transformation Case Study

The organisation

Notting Hill Genesis is one of the largest housing associations in London and the south east, owning and managing more than 66,000 homes with around 2,000 staff, across a range of tenures.

What they were trying to fix

NHG wanted an integration platform and API management capability on Azure, so they could develop, deliver and manage integrations more quickly and at lower cost. That was not a technical preference — it was the foundation their technology strategy needed before anything else could be built on it, both internally and for connectivity to partners such as repairs providers.

The problem underneath it was familiar. Data sat in a spread of internal and external systems, reporting could only reach some of it, and the insight available to the business was limited by whatever a report happened to cover.

The specific challenges

• Limited reporting and restricted data views
• Scalability problems whenever a new source had to be added
• No central location for data collected from internal and third-party systems
• A need to connect existing on-premise and third-party sources to Power BI on Azure
• Moving raw data from those systems into a data lake and Azure SQL for processing
• A wish to begin a genuine analytics journey rather than produce more reports

The second point is the one that usually decides these programmes. When adding a source is expensive, integration stops being a capability and becomes a series of projects — and the backlog grows faster than it can be cleared.

What changed

Building the integration and API management layer on Azure turned that relationship around. New sources connect to an existing platform instead of requiring bespoke work each time, data lands centrally where it can be managed and processed, and reporting draws from one place rather than several.

The visible result was in self-service: more than 50% of customers now use the self-service portal. That figure is a consequence of the integration work rather than a separate project — a portal only earns repeat use when what it shows a resident is accurate at the moment they look.

Why the order mattered

It would have been quicker to build the portal first and integrate behind it later. Providers who do that generally find self-service adoption stalls, because residents check once, find the information stale or incomplete, and go back to phoning.

Doing the integration first is slower to show anything. It is also the reason the adoption figure held.

The automated workflow now runs more than one million cases at Notting Hill Genesis.

"The Neo Technology model allows us to scale our development capacity, accelerating our transformation programmes while future-proofing our business while achieving substantial industry cost savings. Their integrated agile project teams deliver across a range of business requirements in partnership with our Product Owners, such as system enhancements, data integration and cloud migration, enabling Notting Hill Genesis to accelerate our digital transformation goals."

Rajiv Peter, Chief Information Officer, Notting Hill Genesis