IT and Digital bulletin - August 2023

IT and Digital bulletin

An update from the IT and Digital team

Foreword

I would like to welcome you to our second IT and Digital bulletin of 2023 For me, this is quite a landmark update as we are now halfway through our three-year Digital Strategy and improvement road-map that we launched in January 2022.

During the last 18 months or so we have made huge inroads into transforming the organisation and setting the foundations we need to become truly digital As you may be aware,

digitally enabling the processes and services we provide will not only lead to more efficient organisation, but more importantly provide better services and standards to our customers.

I am really proud of our achievements as a team during the past year or so We have continued to provide first class IT availability, support and services, alongside delivering a large number of complex organisational improvement projects such as

Migration of all our infrastructure to the cloud

Deployment of a managed service device refresh programme

Full implementation of Office 365 and SharePoint

A brand-new customer website and colleague intranet site

Baseline reviews of our business systems and provision of data

Up-skilling of colleagues and the introduction of our Digital Heroes

Colleague awareness and resilience with regards to IT cyber security

Identifying and delivering over £130,000 of savings as part of our Digital Efficiency programme

Based on feedback and need from the organisaiton, we have now widened our skill set to provide intelligent data reporting and analytics, support the digital skills and adoption of colleagues and customers, and the ability to review and redesign our business process

By widening and introducing additional skill sets within Hafod, we will no doubt further help the organisation develop, transform and drive efficiencies.

We have another exciting, but challenging, year ahead of us with the delivery of our care transformation programme, the introduction of a new business system for housing, finance and customer services, phase two of our website, and the deployment of our data and insight programme for assets and finance

I would personally like to thank the colleagues within the IT and Digital team for all their hard work and efforts in the delivery of our digital programme, and would also like to thank the wider organisaiton for their valued input and support.

Long may it continue!

Ceri Evans, Head of Digital Development and IT

Who's who?

Digital, Data and Systems team

Dave Bodger brings our digital strategy to life and leads our Digital, Data and Systems team which consists of:

Digital Transformation: Michaella Williams, Jen Griffiths, Rhianne Huntley, Rhiannon Astley and David Heaven, Danielle Roberts and Zoe Cashmore Systems and Data: Chris Lewis, Carys Thomas, Ross Grant, Rhys Bolt and Eduard Partenie

The team supports the business with their wide range of specialist skills and experience across the five following functional areas:

Digital transformation and project delivery

Providing the business with key project management and support with many years’ experience of project delivery and governance. The team ensure that the business is fully engaged, consulted and involved in our transformation projects. Accountable for project initiating, scoping through to full delivery ensuring our digital ambitions are met.

Digital adoption and skills

Supports Hafod in improving our digital skills and inclusion capabilities, ensuring support is provided to colleagues and customers to empower them to adopt and enjoy digital solutions as we bring in new initiatives, systems and customer based digital service offerings.

Business process review and analysis

Supports the delivery of digital improvements and wider organisational process improvements. As part our strategic objectives, we work with departments to review “As Is” processes, and reengineering these based on customer needs to be “slicker and quicker” through the introduction of technology - driving process savings, more efficient ways of working and providing improved level of services.

Customer and colleagues

Focused on the development and improvement of our intranet and public facing website, ensuring our online presence meets the needs of our customers and colleagues that provides information and transactional services 24/7 that are easy to use, at their convenience and is more cost effective to run as an organisation

System improvements and support

The team maintains and develops our core business applications such as QL and INVU. New functionality, integrations, and automations are implemented by the team to help support colleagues in delivering services to our customers. The team also provide end user support, as well as day-to-day routine maintenance, to ensure systems are available when needed. Digital efficiencies submitted through our Efficiency pipeline are assessed and actioned the systems team.

Data, reporting and insights

Our newly formed team are responsible for the rollout of our data strategy. The Data & Reporting Analysts will assist colleagues in delivering new insight through data, using Power BI and cutting-edge data tools to make decision making easier and more transparent. The team will also be responsible for our data standards, helping to make our data available to regulators and key third parties in nationally recognised standards. The quality of our data will be reviewed by this function to ensure colleagues have a reliable single version of the truth.

IT team

Jonathan Carolan leads our IT Operations and Support team. Richard Armstrong, Meurig Lewis, Paul Stemp, Laura Watt, Callum Abel, and Ellie O'Brien make up the team covering four key areas:

IT service desk and incident management

Providing a service desk where colleagues can request help and support for their IT needs as well as report issues or incidents for investigation. Procurement, allocation and configuration of all equipment and peripherals relevant to roles, as well as maintaining IT asset management records.

Infrastructure

Overseeing and ensuring the effective management and maintenance of our IT infrastructure and core systems, both on premise and cloud (servers, networking and connectivity). Also maintaining their integrity and availability to our agreed service levels.

Cyber security

Monitoring, safeguarding, and improving our cyber security arrangements, ensuring the availability of our infrastructure and key systems. Also, analysing our infrastructure and systems compliance and overall performance, mitigating the risk of cyber-attacks.

IT projects and development

Look at new and emerging technologies that could be used to improve or supplement our existing systems. Supporting on-going Digital Transformation projects to deliver key improvements and cost savings for the organisation

IT operations projects currently in flight

Azure enrollment

We're migrating colleague's laptops and desktops to be Intune/Azure enrolled to provide greater control, security, flexibility, and consistent experience across our devices. So far, we have enrolled 59% of laptops to Azure, which is 370 laptops in total.

Device refresh

We're providing schemes and colleagues with modern, suitable equipment for their roles Old equipment is being removed for recycling and usable equipment is being returned to us for redeployment The device refresh has delivered new equipment to 14 schemes so far, including 124 new PCs and 45 new laptops.

Cyber security

Continued awareness and colleague testing of phishing emails and the introduction of additional training programmes as part of our security posture We're also making overall improvements of our cyber security systems, backups, procedures, and functions

Server upgrades

We're migrating all servers that are approaching the end of support this year to modern OS to ensure compliance and security updates.

Antivirus

Working to implement a modern and featured antivirus solution for all Hafod devices In addition, reducing the costs of licensing if possible

Firewalls

Examining current Firewall solutions and upgrading out of date models to ensure compliance. We're also seeing if cost savings can be made due to our move to the hybrid working model.

Digital switchover

We're providing a current known landscape of what the effects of the Digital Switchover 2025 will be for IT relevant systems

Network changes

We're working on a network redesign for St Hilary Court following our migration to cloud. We're analysing the remaining servers and hardware at St Hilary Court and looking at migration to Azure or decommission.

Improving our cyber security

This year we've had a total of seven highly sophisticated phishing attempts; the majority of these incidents involved external companies we use as contractors, making the phishing emails appear very convincing The colleague accounts compromised were all successfully locked, stopping any unwanted access and allowing us to ensure the account was safe to use again. Our URL protection software also put a stop to several malicious links once they were clicked. We're happy to report that the incidents had no impact on the business, aside from the time spent investigating the suspicious links

We're Cyber Essentials Certified

We recently obtained the Cyber Essentials Certification which demonstrates our commitment to cyber security, ensuring the organisation is compliant and up-to-date with the latest standards and best practices. This involves cyber security controls such as firewalls, password policies, disabling unsupported devices and updating or maintaining our current devices

Cyber security controls we've implemented

Multiple factor authentication (MFA) - Authenticating logins minimises the chance of hackers gaining access if an account it compromised

Network policies - If an account has been compromised and a log in is attempted outside of the UK, the account with be locked and IT alerted.

Email filtering policies - We use software to filter incoming emails, for example to detect and reject most spam and phishing attempts.

URL protection - We use software to scan websites sent via external links to check if they are malicious or clean Colleagues are asked whether they think the link is safe and we can use this data to inform training.

Phishing and cyber training

Over the past year, we've been working in partnership with Bob's Business to deliver a suite of new cyber security training modules for colleagues based on areas identified for improvement. Since delivering this training...

The percentage of colleagues likely to click on a phishing link has dropped from 11% to 1% due to the training modules and phishing simulations carried out.

119 out of 130 colleagues who repeatedly clicked on phishing simulations lost their status as a repeated clicker during the second batch of phishing simulations

We saw a steady decline in clickers as more phishing simulations were released each month. Clicks went down from 230 at the peak to two at the lowest.

Digital projects currently in flight

Data, insights and business intelligence

Data lake and insight project

In partnership with an external supplier, we have embarked on an exciting new project to build a ‘data lake’ that will support our mission to cleanse and analyse our data This lake will initially pull information from QL and be tested through building Power BI reports for our repairs and maintenance services This project will support the use of live data for reporting purposes and will continue developing throughout the business once we have completed the objectives of the data lake and accelerator project

We currently have legacy of uncleansed and unmanaged data, which is why we are also completing a data strategy and road-map project that will focus on our future direction, standards and deliverables with regards to the better use and exploitation of data Ceri Evans, Head of Digital Development and IT, is working on this and will be seeking approval by the end of September 2023

Putting the customer first

Customer insights and engagement

We have put together a customer engagement roadmap in partnership with Michelle McGregor, Customer Engagement Coordinator, to gather feedback from our customers on our digital projects. We have engagement activities planned throughout the year to find out what our customers think of our new website, review customer touch points and look at web data trends. Recently, we attended Fir Tree Drive to speak with customers and hear their feedback on our new website.

Website relaunch

We’re very excited to have recently launched our brand-new website for customers. We’ve been working alongside content editors from teams across the organisation for the past few months to completely refresh our content, make sure it’s relevant for customers and add new content to the new site. The features of our new website mean we are offering customers more self-service options to improve efficiency, like reporting ASB or repairs directly on our website at a time that suits them. So far, we've had over 490 form submissions and have seen an increase of 180% in page views on the new site. As part of the second phase of the project, we will be looking to develop a customer portal, integration into our back-end systems, more transactional services, and a live chat feature.

Care transformation

Care digital transformation project

We recently conducted a digital confidence survey for care colleagues to help determine the training and support that will be required for colleagues. Additionally, with the help of Procurement, a supplier has recently been awarded contract for the Digital Care Plan system. We continue to carry out technical testing and preparations of new devices, and process mapping is ongoing. Up next, we’ll be looking to begin our device trials with care colleagues which sees us visiting colleagues at care homes and gathering their feedback on the different devices

We will be moving to an easy-to-use digital Care plan system, which will reduce time spent on administration of paper-copy care plans, and aims promote time spent with residents The care plan system will also enable reporting on a scale we could not achieve with paper-based methods, enabling data-based decision making, and improving operational oversight Training and upskilling for colleagues will help to bolster digital skills, confidence and overall digital inclusion of care colleagues

Infrastructure, systems and security

Telephony business case

We have reviewed our current telephony landscape and identified potential for digital growth We are currently working on a business case that will highlight the issues and capabilities of our current telephony systems, with information on potential replacements to improve our communication with contract holders

Not only will this provide us with the opportunity to improve the way we communicate with customers, there are also opportunities to make cost savings. We've identified areas where we could save costs and have conducted market research into systems that are innovative and user-friendly.

Business systems implementation project

This is one of the biggest projects we’ve embarked on to date and will involve colleagues' input from across the organisation. This project started off as a review of our housing management system (HMS), financial management system (FMS) and other systems directly linked to these.

This review was conducted with input from colleagues across the key business areas and the result was a recommendation that we replace our current HMS and FMS with a solution that better meets the needs of the organisation, supports better processes and will be flexible to meet the needs of our overall strategy moving

forwards

We’ve now mobilised a project off the back of this; the outcome of this project is a replacement of our current housing and financial management systems At this stage, we have projected this will take around 18-24 months to complete

We are currently scoping our requirements with suppliers for a new system and will be doing this until early November, when we will go to tender for the new systems We are looking to start incrementally replacing parts of the current system in spring next year, lasting until the following year when both systems should be fully replaced.

Mobile review and tender

We have been working to identify mobile usage and users across the organisation as part of our mobile tender and review project. We are grateful to have received full support from all areas of the business, and this has allowed us to reduce our mobile users from 750 to 500.

The contract tender will be released during August and will not only provide us with increased data usage and allocation, but will also provide a refresh of our devices and a 24-hour replacement programme for broken items, all at lower

Do you need support from us?

To raise an IT ticket, please email service desk@hafod org uk

Self service: How to...

Reset your password

Go to the IT team intranet page

Click on the 'Self Help – Password Reset' button

Enter your Hafod email address

Select the reason why you are changing your password

Select which method of verification you'd like to use

Enter your new password

Request a new ID card, user or equipment

Go to the IT team intranet page

Click on the 'New IT User, Equipment Request Form & ID Cards' button Select which item you'd like to apply for

Enter the required details - please ensure photos for ID cards are of the colleague against a plain background

Top tip!

Good practice for secure passwords is to utilise the 'three random word' technique. For example, changing your password from ThreeRandomWords to 19ThreeRan!domWords96 would take a hacker 57 million years to crack instead of 19 hours!

We're looking for digital efficiencies

Do you have an idea of how we can become more efficient across Hafod, either by digitising some of the things we do manually today or by automating things that currently frustrate us and take us away from supporting our customers?

Submit your idea on the Digital Transformation Office intranet page, under the 'Digital Development' tab

We want your digital ideas!

We want to hear your ideas about how we can use technology and digital solutions to improve our services! No idea is too small or too big, whether it’s something simple to make everyday tasks far easier for our customers, or an idea that has a more significant impact on the way we work and how we deliver our services.

Visit hafod.org.uk/digital-transformation-journey to submit your idea now

Questions?

If you have any feedback or suggestions about this bulletin, or you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.

digital@hafod.org.uk