Want to get a handle on all the information flows within housing cooperatives?
Traditional document management solutions used by housing authorities often focus primarily on tenant information. But is that still true today? In our view, more is needed to ensure optimal information management, because housing authority employees are dealing with more than just the growing volume of tenant documents.
Covers much more than just tenant files
Want to get a handle on all your information flows? That means documents related to real estate projects, maintenance contracts, supplier invoices, rental brochures, financial reports, sustainability reports, and much more must be easy to find. In many cases, this is done inefficiently. The result can be lengthy searches, as well as having to review information that turns out to be out of date.
Five Challenges
In an article in CorporatieGids Magazine, Marco van Drogenbroek, our Business Consultant for housing cooperatives, highlighted a number of current challenges. We’d like to draw attention to five of them:
1
Lack of control over all the information: this is because documents are stored in many different locations, such as OneDrive, SharePoint, and other network locations.
2
A much wider variety of files: these days, it’s not just email messages anymore, but also photos, videos, audio clips, and WhatsApp messages that can be found all over the place. As a result, a 360° picture of a tenant is a pipe dream.
3
Increasing regulatory pressure: Personal data may no longer be recorded, even though tenants do provide privacy-sensitive information.
4
The digital truth is hard to determine: that's because there are more and more applications in which data is stored. But which system can you trust if they all say something different?
5
A lack of structure: this is usually because no clear agreements have been made about it.
Enterprise Information Management as a Solution
Centralizing information, gaining a 360° view of a tenant, handling all kinds of file formats, identifying and automatically deleting privacy-sensitive documents, and integrating with other systems—all of this is possible. Modern technology, which goes beyond document management to encompass information management, is here.
However, you’ll always have to agree on a workable structure. The keywords (metadata) that are already linked to existing data can, of course, be used. That’s where Marco’s advice comes into play.