NHBC  currently has an enterprise system with around 5m records as well as 10 additional systems holding hundreds of thousands more records. With information stored in multiple systems, invariably, duplicates arise resulting in conflicting information that interferes with business processes and causes trust in the value of the information to weaken, says Pete Smyth, group head of IT for NHBC (right)

“ Trillium  Software System (San Antonio based) will cleanse, match and consolidate our multi-system data for migration to a corporate information repository presenting a single view to all enterprise processes,” Smyth says.

NHBC is the UK’s leading warranty and insurance provider for new homes, covering more than 80 % of new homes being built and currently protects approximately 1.7 m homes.

Defence estates data problems

The Ministry of Defence, one of the UK’s largest landowners, lacks an efficient database on its estate and is struggling to cut costs as a result says a National Audit Office report, which found the MoD property cost problems came in spite of some improvements in planning and disposal.
The MoD is targeting a 12 % cut in sites, but lacks the right information to help it assess locations on how heavily sites are used, their running costs, or the potential income from a sale.

MoD estate data was being held in a variety of places, both centrally and locally. The NAO found that it was generally “incomplete” and “stored in different data systems that are difficult to reconcile”.

The department had cut staff over a 10 year period to 2008, but only reducing property at a rate three times slower than that, and many missed opportunities for a quick reduction in property, said the NAO.

The MoD lacks the central data to aid analysis, the report said, in order to help it reduce costs “in a structured way”. It needed clear data for each site on operational importance, usage, condition, potential value, and running costs.

"The Ministry of Defence needs to change its mindset towards its estate, so that not only does it, rightly, focus on operational needs, but also gives due emphasis to making the reductions in costs needed in the current fiscal climate.

"The evidence is that the Department could substantially build on the progress it has already made in rationalising its estate and reducing costs. But it should do this, not by simply responding to individual opportunities as they occur, but in a systematic way, based on clear objectives, adequate mechanisms for achieving them and good quality central data" said  (right) Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office.

Data and systems are not in themselves enough to secure structured cost reductions, concludes the recommendations. The Department should, in developing its model for managing its estate, put in place levers and mechanisms that encourage all parts of the Department and the Services to drive through structured cost reduction aggressively.

The MoD recently cancelled a contract tender for IT consultancy services worth £141m understood to be part of expenditure cuts following the chancellor's Emergency Budget, but its £8bn Defence Information Infrastructure project, focused on providing a single information and communications platform to the MoD, partly through hand-held terminals to 300,000 forces personnel around the world is still underway.