CIO Roundtable: Fighting the housing crisis: How to accelerate building permits

Processing building permits faster is possible right now

Slow processing of building permits has led to backlogs and long wait times for much-needed housing development. IT leaders at all levels of government, and especially at the local and municipal levels, need to take the lead in the fight against the housing crisis and optimize how building permits are processed.

IT leaders can help significantly

• IT leaders don’t have to wait for political, policy, and process changes to make a difference and can help now.
• They can take the lead by optimizing existing processes to help users achieve their goals and manage risks.
• CIOs should spearhead this effort proactively rather than waiting for political direction.

How IT leaders can take the lead on accelerating building permits

Join our distinguished panel of IT leaders from across the public sector to discuss:

• Solutions that are practical and actionable for IT in local government to speed up processing of housing permits.
• Ways of using technology to optimize existing permit processes effectively.
• How CIOs can actually plan and execute these projects beyond "the idea."

Join IT leaders from across the public sector to explore practical solutions to optimize existing permitting processes with technology!

Optimize the permitting process for digital service delivery

Your Challenge

• Permits are taking too long to process, leading to delays in construction. This limits the housing market supply and affordability.
• Cities lack an effective framework to support digital transformation. Innovation can decrease timelines required to fulfill permit requests.
• Policy amendments are complex and take too long to implement. There are too many manual processes still in place.
• The city CIO cannot determine what vendors offer the right features and functionalities for their needs.

Common Obstacle

• Cities do not know where or how to begin or how to engage the right people.
• Every department has unique implementation requirements.
• Not every process is suitable for automation. Regulations, policies, process complexities, and ethics may impede the end-to-end automation that stakeholders are expecting.
• Reluctance to change. Process optimization and automation brings significant operational, technical, and cultural change that business users and IT are often unwilling or unprepared to accept and adopt.

Info-Tech's Approach

• Implementation can be fast tracked with Info-Tech’s Rapid Application Selection Framework. Through vendor research and interviews, various features, functionalities, and digital opportunities are identified that each vendor offers.
• Optimize your processes. Apply good practices to first optimize and then automate key business processes. Take a user-centric perspective to understand how users interact with technology to complete their tasks.
• Deliver minimum viable automations (MVAs). Maximize the learning of automation solutions and business operational changes through small, strategic automation use cases.

Info-Tech Insight

"Seamless integrations, updating the ERP solutions, and process optimization makes the building permit process more streamlined and can significantly reduce the timelines for approval."

Slow permit processes lead to housing supply gaps and lack of affordability

Local Governments are re-evaluating policies of land use and permitted regulation to address permit timelines, affordability, and availability of housing

• Local Governments are working to simplify the regulation processes and reduce the timelines for issuing permits by working toward digital governance over traditional procedures for issuing permits.
• Streamline the inspection procedures by introducing fast-track online interfaces for transparent governance. The top three needs for Local Governments in better inspections procedures are as follows:
  • Integrations with all concerned departments and authorities
  • Upgrading of current IT systems
  • Uniformity through training

Other key technology elements required by rapid policy and governance framework changes:

• Local Governments need to define the roles and responsibilities by realigning the digital product and service ownership. Now is the time for IT leaders to identify the candidates and clearly define the responsibilities.
• Redefine the digital permitting strategy to accelerate issuing permits.
• Identify the optimization and automation opportunities for the core system. This needs to be rethought with agile enterprise architectures in mind.

Stats

• 627 days The average wait to get a full building permit for an apartment project in San Francisco.
  – San Francisco Chronicle
• 2 years The current average wait time for British Columbia provincial permits.
  – Premier David Eby