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David Walker, Head of Property at Hyperoptic, takes us through a typical day at work. I wake up in ‘the project,’ which is the pet name for my flat in Notting Hill, currently being subjected to extension and refurbishment. The first priority is a strong black coffee and I am quickly on my regular walking commute to my company headquarters, which are close to Hammersmith station. Hyperoptic is the UK’s largest gigabit broadband provider and delivers the country’s fastest broadband speeds, of up to 1Gbps (1,000 megabits per second), which is at least 20 times faster than the UK average. We work with property owners, developers and professionals, designing and installing our dedicated fibre infrastructure to new buildings and existing developments. We work with 150+ developers and are a trusted partner of many housing providers, including A2Dominion, Hyde Group, Catalyst, Genesis Housing and Notting Hill Housing Trust. We’re also working with 50 councils across the UK to supply connectivity to their social housing stock. During my 25-minute walk, I always keep an eye out for new hoardings and cranes along the way. It’s always good to get in early so spotting a new development can become a good opportunity for my sales colleagues. I am in the office by 9am and I head straight to the coffee counter at the local WeWork office, which is next to my company headquarters. The sales and marketing team have recently relocated here as we’ve outgrown the office space next door. Once I have had my second caffeine fix, I plug in my laptop at one of the hot-desks and quickly scan my emails, being sure to highlight any urgent enquiries or client/team support that needs addressing. My first meeting is with our new chief technology and information officer, Pascal Koster. He is part of a new executive team, which our CEO appointed to ensure that we are all well supported as the company grows. The meeting went well – Pascal was particularly impressed with the smart home projects we’re working on and the future-proofing that we can enable for clients in the 5G arena for new builds and regeneration areas. I then head out for a light lunch with a key developer client of mine. We’ve been working together for over three years and have built an excellent relationship. He offers some insights into both the UK and Spanish markets where he is active. The conversation is on a wide range of topics from Led Zeppelin and schooling through to an Openreach deployment of new ducting infrastructure and the opportunities arising from Brexit. He is genuinely excited by the dampening of market sentiment and the prospect of securing more sites to feed his business. The penny has finally dropped for developers; they simply can’t build units without day-one connectivity and still maintain customer satisfaction. Developers want to protect their five-star ratings for customer satisfaction, and if a customer has broadband straight away they’re less likely to go around looking at any scuff marks on ceilings or squeaky hinges. We’re the only broadband provider in the country that measures itself on day-one connectivity; we have achieved over 96 per cent success over the last three years. After my meeting with Pascal, I head to a new client meeting in the City. It looks good – there are three new projects which, although relatively small, can offer Hyperoptic an opportunity to work with a new AV consultant and a world-class architect, in particular because we thrive on expanding our knowledge of the day-two systems (i.e. what gets connected onto our infrastructure). The ‘proptech’ market has changed hugely since we started in 2011 – most people now understand the language of ‘smart buildings’ and ‘smart homes’. The pace of technology continues unabated and at the heart is our new infrastructure, which will serve it in its many future guises. I am seeing developers, owners and managers to find some new and cutting-edge integrated systems and apps that have the power to revolutionise lives, such as remote monitoring for dementia patients. I head back to the office for the regular weekly sales and marketing meeting. There is exciting news for the planning of the next financial year with more team members, more marketing and the hybrid vigour that three new board members are already bringing to the Hyperoptic brand. 2018 was a very busy year and we grew massively. We now power over half a million homes and businesses across the UK with our full-fibre service, and we are on track to pass two million homes by 2021. Over 160,000 social housing properties have access, or are about to be connected, to our full-fibre network. David Walker is Head of Property at Hyperoptic. https://www.hyperoptic.com/ If you'd like to share your housing sector experience, all you need to do is get in touch at recruitment@housing-technology.com. 

Phil Moss, Chief Technology Officer, takes us through a typical day at Procurement for Housing. I’m more of an early morning person, so my day starts around 6am when I make a quick coffee and leave my home in Lancashire. Depending on my schedule, I’ll either turn left and drive to our office in Manchester where our software development team is based – they are the ‘techies’ working on the software behind our procurement frameworks. But if I’m meeting the people who use our technology – PfH’s sales team and account managers – then I turn right and head to our main office in Warrington. Where ever I am, everything stops at 10.30am. The technology team (that’s six of us) takes part in a daily ‘scrum’ call where everyone across all of our sites answers three questions: we want to know what they did yesterday; what their plans are for today; and what blockers they’re facing. Today’s scrum focused on automating categorisation and how we can ensure that lowest-level transactional data is routinely classified to detect if a member is spending too much on a certain product. As the largest spend aggregator in the UK social housing sector, PfH collects a lot of this transactional data. We manage over a million invoices a year – that’s £250 million of spending. Our aim is to use this unique position to provide housing-specific insights to landlords. Technology, in particular machine learning, is a key part of achieving this. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence. AI uses computer programmes to think and learn like humans and machine learning is one of those programmes. It’s all about identifying patterns in historical data – algorithms learn those patterns and then forecast future trends. Historically, the housing sector hasn’t been great at managing data or categorising products – and this has led to a delay in the adoption of AI and smart analytics. There is very little granular detail in the sector, so it’s been hard to introduce machine learning for predictive analysis, or to compare spending data with public data sets to see if a housing provider is paying too much for, for example, kitchen refurbishments. The scrum meeting today focused on tackling this problem. Since I began at PfH around a year ago, I’ve used technology to put data at the heart of everything we do. Every single line of pricing, transactional and CRM information goes into our data warehouse where it is used for analysis and reporting. On a monthly basis, this data warehouse examines 300,000 lines of spending data from more than 900 housing providers. For the last six months, our team has been refining the quality of this data and developing technologies, bespoke to the social housing sector, which we can use to categorise information and provide members with intuition around their procurement spending. This data analysis was taken to a new level when PfH bought Valueworks. The system was specially designed for the social housing sector and it provides a collaborative, real-time view across all spending data so that housing providers can more effectively track prices, control costs and improve quality. The software enables us to group our members’ transactional data into specific programmes of work and then identify whether they are spending too much on certain products compared with their peers, whether they are purchasing several types of one product unnecessarily or whether there are better value alternatives available. After today’s scrum meeting, I meet with PfH’s six-strong account management team who liaise directly with our members on a day-to-day basis. One of the digital initiatives we’ve introduced recently is VFM reporting. This analytics service gives members insight into their spending over a particular period, highlighting saving opportunities. Reports are created using data dissected by our Microsoft PowerBI software and account managers present the reports to members. I’m meeting the team to take them through the latest capabilities of the system. Today, we talk about how the reports can tackle ‘product drift’, when an organisation spends less on the core products that PfH has negotiated reduced rates for, leading to larger bills. I also explained that VfM reports can pinpoint patterns such as a member that is spending more on a particular product compared with its expenditure last year. After lunch at my desk, I rush across the M62 to a meeting at Liverpool University’s School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science. PfH runs a knowledge transfer partnership (KTP) with the university to explore how machine learning can help housing providers’ procurement activities and I’m meeting our KTP associate, Dr David Hamilton. KTPs help businesses like PfH to innovate by linking them with research organisations like Liverpool University. They enable companies to bring in the latest skills (David has a PhD in distributed algorithms and machine learning is his specialist area) to deliver a specific, strategic innovation project. For us, that innovation project is showing housing providers the potential of their data and helping them to manage and use it in the right way. Our KTP is coming to an end and today I’m speaking to David about the next steps, particularly around using predictive analysis to learn from asset management invoice data and how we can link this data to price indices to show housing providers the best time to buy certain products. Back in Warrington, I meet Steve Malone, PfH’s managing director. We are discussing the latest smart procurement technologies to use with our members. Data from technologies such as IoT thermostats, window sensors or smart boiler parts is already recognising ‘failure in advance’ and this could help housing providers switch from reactive repairs to planned maintenance. Machine learning could be used to recommend comparison products, such as a boiler that is cheaper, has a longer warranty and a smaller carbon footprint. Housing providers could also use ‘emotional AI’ to analyse social media mentions about suppliers and combine this with data on contract performance, legal disputes or redundancies to build risk profiles. My day finishes around 5.30pm when I head home. If there is enough daylight remaining, I might jump on the bike and enjoy the Lancashire countryside before an early night. In reality, I probably spend much of the evening negotiating with my two children to convince them it’s bedtime! Phil Moss is the chief technology officer for Procurement for Housing. http://procurementforhousing.co.uk/ If you'd like to share your housing sector experience, all you need to do is get in touch at recruitment@housing-technology.com.

George Schaar, Head of Research & Development at Stratis Security, talks to us about his 20 year career in security. I’ve worked in security for more than 20 years, protecting the homes of celebrities and the rich as well as developing technology to secure homes and housing estates from Ipswich to Ireland. For the past three years, I’ve been working with our specialist team from our technology innovation base in Suffolk. There really is a melting pot of the latest smart homes and internet of things solutions here, with other companies such as Facebook, Cisco and Nokia also on the same site. My current focus is progressing the development of a secure app which allows clients to monitor camera surveillance in their properties remotely. Clients can also get alarms alerting them on their phones if windows or doors have been broken or tampered with. Fingerprint and facial recognition Our solutions include fingerprint identification technology, which is nonintrusive, fast and efficient and can secure large areas over many levels. For example, entrances and exit points to lifts and stairwells, through to individual rooms, cupboards and flats. Stratis has also developed facial recognition for entry systems, with our cameras scanning the iris and matching faces from a prestored database of images. Used in conjunction with video surveillance, we have significantly tightened security and improved accountability at a major residential block in Ipswich, where residents now show their faces at the front entrance to gain entry. I never thought I’d be implementing technology that first inspired me from Blade Runner in the early 80s!   We have also helped combat a range of issues at two blocks of flats in Ipswich, including rats in ground floor bin-stores as a result of fly-tipping, as well as graffiti and non-residents, who would gather outside and in reception areas, gaining access to the blocks and moving freely around the building. In one of the blocks, we installed facial recognition cameras and key fobs, with card access to lifts and stairwells, making it possible to prohibit access as well as track individuals and only allow access to designated areas.   Social housing applications For social housing providers, our technologies have many applications, such as if a tenant has lost or forgotten their key, or for vulnerable residents in extra-care schemes or sheltered accommodation, allowing their relatives, friends or carers to gain access. We were at the CIH conference in Manchester earlier this year and are now talking with a range of housing providers about how to deploy our solutions as part of their business transformation programmes and their wider smart home and internet of things strategies.   Lasers No longer being the exclusive province of science fiction, long-range lasers are an effective and flexible way to monitor and protect your property. Lasers can be set up as an invisible fence around an office, for example, or in areas that are targeted for high-value materials, such as a church roof or to protect copper piping. Any tampering to the laser triggers an alert, which is sent back as a high-quality audio file that can be monitored remotely.   Destruction day My team and I are currently working towards ISO accreditations. With the impact of the Grenfell tragedy, we have also developed fire safety and reinforced doors. At the time of writing, we are arranging a ‘destruction day’ on September 26 at our base in Martlesham Heath in Suffolk where we have challenged the 4,000 staff at Adastral Park (home also of BT’s innovation centre) and invited them to break through our reinforced doors with sledge hammers, angle grinders and cordless drills. So confident are we of the resilience of our reinforced doors, we have also invited Britain’s strongest man, Eddie Hall, along to pit his strength against our doors. George Schaar is the head of research and development at Stratis Security http://www.stratissecure.com/