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@Work4Homes

Trans-European Networks providing 21st Century Housing to Europe's Tenants

New Technologies for Information and Communication with Tenants

The project

The project involves upgrading access infrastructures in properties of the over 100 million tenants served covered by the European housing association CECODHAS, enabling or improving access to housing services and third party service providers. Workflow will be introduced to support key processes maintenance, metering, placement, general query handling or security as well as provision of third party services such as care or support. The aim is radically to improve service delivery processes and hence quality of living environments for all income and age groups.

Goals

The phase is required to deal with remaining areas of uncertainty and risk in the project, in particular to demonstrate the feasibility, acceptability and profitability of the planned services. The principal obstacle to the project is uncertainty in the requirements of the markets and areas of activity to be addressed. Adapting solutions to existing information and telecommunications systems in housing provider organisations represents a further area of uncertainty., and adequate feasibility study and validation work is required to address these topics. The work to be done thus includes detailing user requirements, checking on market developments, refining the overall virtual enterprise approach, implementing and evaluating an set of "Site Trials", evaluating the benefits of Framework-based implementation, validation, revision and extension of business plans, and dissemination of information about results.

Trans-European coverage

The target market for @Work4Homes solutions is very large. The huge importance is reflected in the membership of CECODHAS. The 37 full members of CECODHAS are national and regional housing organisations from the 15 EU member states. There are associate members in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Norway, Russia, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland. The full list is as follows: Belgium, Danmark, Germany, Spain, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, The Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Sweden, UK, Czech Republic Estonia, Hungary Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovac Republic, Switzerland (associated), Bulgaria (candidate). Every 4th European, some 100 million people, are provided with housing by a member of CECODHAS.

Target user addressed

The services to be developed in this project together make up a new way of providing housing, a "virtual" housing service enterprise. Such a virtual enterprise uses new access methods and process support tools to supply a new quality of housing service.
From a user perspective, @Work4homes services provide the following:

• supplier users (mainly SMEs) such as maintenance contractors will be able to accept contracts for maintenance and report progress online through any of multiple access techniques, performing their work fully integrated with IT-supported business processes in the housing provider organisation. This quality of access will also be available to many other suppliers and collaboraters with housing providers, including specialist SMEs providing furnishing to poor or even destitute tenant groups or social services providing support to older or disabled tenants. Currently, business relations to contractors involve time-consuming paper-based techniques throughout or at best systems where paper is substituted by IT applications within the main offices of the housing provider. Often no-one knows whether work is delayed or completed, and contractors have to adapt their way of working to cope with cumbersome legacy systems at the provider.
• teleworking employee users of the housing provider organisation will, from home and from mobile settings, be able to access company information and to take part in business processes much as if they were in the head offices of the organisation, enabling them to perform their on-site or out-of-hours tasks that much more effectively. Currently, caretakers work on a daily basis close to housing they are responsible for but remotely from their offices, with poor access to their colleagues and other resources and themselves reachable at best by phone.
• tenant and owner users will be able to interact with housing providers from their living room in a very user-friendly fashion, will be able to receive advanced services such as videotelephone-based support services as well as having access to high-speed internet and digital TV , also provided by third parties. Currently support service providers have to send personnel to client premises, and tenants at best receive information from their housing authority occasionally on paper.
• staff carrying out collaborative projects at national and European level will as users have access to state-of-the-art collaboration tools to support their work, hosted by specialist providers working with national and European associations. Currently much time is lost in travel and in periods of poorly coordinated work.

Technical perspective

The operations of a Virtual Service Enterprise can be partitioned into three main areas of activity:

• Trading with customers directly or via agents or brokers
• Trading with partner organisations whether upstream or downstream in the business process / value-chain
• Core and support process performance by staff on-site, or mobile and/or remote from a central office site (teleworkers).

Each area brings different demands to the IT provision required by each company comprising an Virtual Service Enterprise. Regional and global standards will be widely deployed and de facto industry standards to be used include Java, Windows 98 / NT / 2000, and Domino Enterprise Connection Services. A variety of networks including high speed access to residences and digital cellular will be utilised to interconnect between sites, teleworkers and partner organisations. Interoperability problems from network diversity will be minimised by utilisation of Internet standards to provide a uniform transport layer across the networks.

Trans-European coverage

Expected benefits

The business case for introducing VSE techniques into housing delivery is compelling. The housing service providers in the consortium - in common with providers across Europe - wish to exploit new IT process support and wide-scale and broadband IP communications to address the high cost of providing housing for low income groups, for caring for the ageing population or the need for security in the home. Very significant savings in staff time, strong improvements in quality of service to tenants and hence increased attractiveness of housing to new and existing tenants are main arguments for the project. Housing providers in the consortium have individual business cases for their plans to implement either a quite comprehensive set of features of the VSE Framework or to implement a more focussed application while locating this within the Framework and ensuring openness for addition of further components.

Expected results

Some of the results being produced by the project workpages cover the following:

• detailed documentation of user requirements,
• market developments and organisational parameters,
• refinement of the overall virtual enterprise approach,
• design, implementation and evaluation of a set of 8 trials,
• evaluation of the benefits with at least 500 employees and SME contractors' staff as well as to up to 200,000 tenants across Europe;
• utilisation of common architecture for access systems to ensure solution convergence and interoperability ,
• validation, revision and extension of business plans, and
• building the foundation for rapid deployment of the solutions throughout European housing provision.

Project Acronym: @work4homes

Start: 2001-04-01

End: 2002-09-30

Co-ordinator:

empirica - Gesellschaft für Kommunikations und Technologiefoschung mbH

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