At the recent infoboss Unlocked event, Mark Hobart, MD of infoboss and Nicky Hawkins Director of Data Services, 3C Consultants, walked through the platform’s flagship use case: data quality & compliance management.
For many organisations, especially those operating in highly regulated environments, unreliable data is more than an inconvenience. It drives unnecessary cost, heightens risk and slows the pace of work. In social housing in particular, governance failures and regulatory downgrades are often rooted in poor data.
The real cost of poor data
Low quality data creates financial drag through rework, duplicated processes and operational inefficiency. Knowledge workers spend huge amounts of time searching for information and correcting it before it can be used. Alongside this, the risk profile increases. When dealing with tenants, property safety and statutory inspections, organisations simply cannot afford blind spots.
How infoboss closes the gap
The Infoboss process begins by ingesting data from across the organisation. As the platform pulls information in, it generates metadata that provides immediate insight into what the organisation holds. It works with both structured and unstructured data. For the latter, it enhances the metadata held though extracting text content, identifying patterns and detecting entities such as credit card, NI numbers, bank details and many more things. This creates a rich metadata set to help describe and understand your structured and unstructured data assets.
A recent addition is automated data profiling that shows the quality of a dataset within minutes. This gives teams a fast understanding of where issues lie and what quality & compliance rules may need to be created. In practice, rules often span multiple systems, highlighting mismatches, missing information or logic errors that no single system can detect.
infoboss also introduces policy-driven remediation. Most organisations have policies covering data protection and retention but struggle to enforce them. The platform can trigger, manage and enforce audit, supported by agentic AI where appropriate, with human oversight built in.
Crucially, it helps quantify the impact of poor data. By attaching metadata to rules, teams can associate issues with cost, risk or operational impact and present this clearly to business stakeholders. This is often the moment when investment in data governance becomes self-evident and tangible.
Why organisations engage
Organisations typically come to infoboss’ partners, such as 3C, for several reasons:
- Quality and compliance
Improving the quality, integrity and reliability of data assets, meeting legislative requirements such as GDPR, aligning to internal policies and improving assurance. - Workflows and remediation
Identifying errors and driving automated or controlled correction. For example, resolving legacy system quirks such as default dates of birth that create inaccurate records. - Data migration
Transforming, enriching and loading data during system changes, allowing organisations to reduce project data risk and benefit from retiring old licences without losing historic insight. - Information requests
Enabling teams to self-serve operational questions in seconds rather than relying on analyst time. - Data Warehouse or Lakehouse needs
Acting as a central store or integrating with existing analytics architectures. - Data governance
Providing catalogues, ownership models and tools that support data governance across the organisation. - Insight development
Allowing visualisation tools to sit on top of trusted, well-structured data.
How implementation works for 3C clients
Most organisations tend to start with a proof of concept (POC), focussed on data from one area of the business e.g. customer or asset data. The journey begins with server setup and once provisioned the POC begins. infoboss can connect to almost any system, though some require extra collaboration from software suppliers.
Operational users are involved early. They offer the clearest view of data pain points and provide the context needed to shape meaningful data anomaly detection rules. The team imports data, apply baseline rules and exposes issues for discussion. Rules are refined, metadata is added and automated monitoring is enabled where appropriate.
Training is delivered to ensure users understand the software, not just the outputs. Meetings maintain progress and ensure decisions can be made quickly. The proof of concept typically concludes with a presentation that showcases findings, quantifies impact and demonstrates the wider value.
The success of 3C’s approach lies in combining software capability with sector knowledge. Teams can spot issues clients haven’t recognised, such as compliance gaps in asset, safety or servicing data. This mix of expertise and technology is one of the reasons infoboss and 3C’s approach resonates so strongly in social housing.
A real-world example
One provider using the Cx housing management system and Keystone asset management system ran a full asset data audit through infoboss. The platform pulled all property data, applied 72 rules, added impact metadata and set up automated monitoring.
This revealed issues such as missing heating types, incomplete component records and out-of-policy renewal dates. It also exposed critical compliance gaps, including properties with no recorded gas certificate or electrical test. These risks carried serious regulatory consequences and had previously been hidden in the organisation’s data.
The regulatory reality
The social housing sector is under intense scrutiny. Governance downgrades are common and most relate directly to data issues. The housing ombudsman also investigates complaints that often originate from data failures. As a result, the strongest motivator for improving data is now risk: fear of non-compliance, reputational damage and the real-world impact on tenant safety.
3C Consultants – infoboss Partner
A leading supplier of IT and data related services to the UK social housing sector. Accessing and managing reliable data is becoming increasingly critical to the prosperity of a business. High-quality, well-managed data provides vital intelligence to work efficiently, whilst empowering you to make the right strategic decisions. 3C Consultants has the skills and experience to support your data journey.