Improving our IT systems

Evolve Housing’s IT team has been busy at work over the past financial year, improving our systems so that our employees are better able to collaborate, work remotely, and be confident in our cyber security processes.

ROLLING OUT NEW CLOUD SYSTEMS

We have successfully implemented Software as a Service, moving our enterprise resource planning system Tech1 onto a cloud platform. This allows employees to use the system wherever they are.

Our organisation’s infrastructure was also moved to a cloud platform, using Infrastructure as a Service platform Microsoft Azure. These cloud-based systems can be considered as ‘elastic platforms’ — technology that can grow as our business grows, stretching to meet any demands or changes required.

In the 2020–2021 financial year, we also completed the rollout of Office365, which allows greater collaboration and communication across the organisation. This will help our employees work together more effectively and provide a better level of customer service to clients.

Another project we have begun implementation of is Disaster Recovery as a Service for our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. This is a platform that allows us to back up our organisation’s data every 10 minutes, allowing us to ensure business continuity and the ability to keep our important files and information safe no matter what happens.

RENT REVIEW AUTOMATION PROJECT

During the year, Evolve Housing also created an automated online tool that can calculate a tenant’s weekly rent faster and more efficiently. Rent review is a biannual process that is carried out by all community housing providers, and involves tenants updating information about their living and financial circumstances so that the CHP can determine if their rent needs to be changed.

Currently, this process is done manually by employees, who have to calculate each tenant’s rent separately then print out a letter notifying them of the change (if any).

The rent review automation project aims to speed up this process, by creating a secure digital calculator that will allow CHP staff to export tenant information in bulk batches for rent calculation.

This tool will save CHPs a significant amount of time and money and is the first project of its kind in the industry.

While the project is being developed by Evolve Housing, we have already had interest from other CHPs wishing to access the calculator and hope to roll it out across the whole industry when completed.

SECURITY FRAMEWORK

We are undergoing the implementation of a new security framework, the Information Security Management System (ISMS) Framework.

This is aligned to ISO27001/NIST and the Australian Security Centre (essentials 8) and will see us adopting the same stringent security standards as the Australian government recommends.

This project is estimated to take 2 years and will involve implementing 48 separate policies across the organisation. Policies include annual awareness