“New construction and renovation are vital components of our nation’s economy and critical to ensuring the welfare and safety of the American public. In this time of both heightened security cautions and increased new construction and renovation, building departments are faced with an increased workload, daunting new challenges, while meeting a raised expectation in the public and private sector for timely service.

Faced with such pressures with diminishing budgets and staff shortage, building departments have increasingly turned to information technology as a tool to make their programs more efficient and effective. A growing number of building departments have successfully reviewed their existing program operations and applied information technology to one or more of their codes administration and enforcement processes. These processes include online permit processing, electronic plan submittals, plan tracking and review, licensing and the scheduling of field inspections. In some cases, savings that have been achieved have cut in half the amount of time it takes for government and the private sector to complete a regulatory process.

Examples of types of savings are:

• Cobleskill, NY, (population 4,533) reduced the amount of staff time it takes to do a building permit from 1 hour to 15 minutes by using I.T.
• Clay County, FL, (population 140,814) applied I.T. to its inspection scheduling and was able to cut by half the number of staff necessary to perform that function and reduce by 75% the amount of time customers had to wait for inspections.
• Chicago’s (population 2,846,000) online permit submittals and processing enabled customers to reduce the amount of time it took staff to process a package of building permits for commercial structures from 8 hours to 2.5 hours.
• Los Angeles (population 3,641,000) applied I.T. to 8 codes administration and enforcement processes and as a result, was able to handle an 88% increase in construction activity with a 1.5% increase in staff and a significant reduction in customer wait and processing times.
• Ohio’s Department of Commerce applied I.T. to 6 codes administration and enforcement processes. The agency reduced the time to perform inspection scheduling and conducting inspections on an average from 2 hours to 1 hour.

Jurisdictions responding to the survey that used I.T. identified the following items as the most important benefits to the application of I.T. to their codes administration and enforcement programs:

• Enhanced their working relationship with their clients (builders, contractors, public).
• Enabled them to offer services 24/7/365.
• Enabled them to share critical data with other agencies.
• Enabled the jurisdiction to better prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters.