In the world of Business Intelligence (BI), it can be tempting to tidy up, or hide bad data so that it "looks right". When you're building dashboards or reports that will be seen by leadership teams or operational managers, you might feel the pressure to make things neat, consistent, and complete - it massively reduces trust if they're not. But here's the truth: sticking a plaster over poor user data doesn't fix the wound underneath. If you're reporting on unreliable or incom

Automated communications are only as good as the data they carry. In Civica Cx, built-in tags go a long way - but only so far. What if you want to pull in precise, situation-specific data into your emails, letters, or texts? That’s where Conditional Data Tags come in. And once you understand them, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without them. Why Conditional Tags? Out of the box, Cx provides a limited set of built-in tags. But modern workflows demand flexibility. Its far

I have the great pleasure of working with so many Civica Cx sites, and one question that seems to come up fairly frequently is: "Should I...

The Post Office Scandal: What Do We Take from It? The Post Office scandal, one of the most significant miscarriages of justice in recent UK history. It highlighted the devastating consequences of flawed IT systems and governance failures. Hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of fraud due to faults in the Horizon IT system, leading to wrongful prosecutions, financial ruin, and immense personal suffering. As the scandal unfolds, it provides a stark reminder of the

We're all no stranger to the ever-evolving landscape of regulatory requirements. From April 2025, changes to the Annual Return on the Scottish Social Housing Charter (ARC) will take effect, bringing with them new reporting expectations and removing some existing requirements. Stay ahead of these changes, look at data capture now, and make your reporting life easier! I know firsthand that keeping up with regulatory changes can be a challenge, but with the right approach, you c

The Importance of Forward Planning in Census Data Integration for Cx Housing System Introduction Census data collection within housing associations is essential for understanding tenant demographics, improving service delivery, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. However, too often, the surveys are collected and passed over to someone to load in to a system with no involvement to data and the task of unravelled the ball of wool begins! Get it wrong, and it l

Attending the Power BI Summit hosted by RADACAD offers invaluable opportunities for IT consultants to deepen their understanding of advanced data architectures and their practical applications. Not just the structured presentations, but the opportunity to join the Q&As after each one and ask your questions to Microsoft MVPs across the globe. One session I really enjoyed was delivered by Kelly Broekstra, who demystified the Medallion Architecture tracing its conceptual roots

In this post I show you how you can pull information field responses in to Communications Remove manual entry?, improve communication quality? reduce error? be more efficient? It’s been a while since I posted on here. 2024 didn’t start quite as I expected but we’re going to finish on a high. As a family we were incredibly lucky to not lose anyone to Covid, and in our small metaphorical and literal bubble, life was simpler. I had been grounded by BoJo and his chums. This d

We recently learned about stored procedures and how these can be created for bulk communications. This week we're going to look at conditional alerts. If you've not met conditional alerts yet, you should definitely go and read more about them. What is an Alert? Chat GPT sums it up well: An alert is a notification or message generated by a system or application to draw attention to a particular event, condition, or situation. Alerts are designed to provide timely informati

In an earlier post, web-services-and-why-you-should-care we talked through what web services are and what you can do with them. We then also learned in soap-vs-rest , how Civica are due to rebuild all the current web services on the REST protocol. All that said, SOAP remains a valid candidate on which to build your integration project and so over a number of posts, I'll be talking through how each of the important web services work, and how they can be used. What lang