A northern European city enhances development planning and oversight

Challenge

As a renowned design center, this European city is committed to minimizing the environmental impact of development. This focus drives city planning and building request and approval processes. A significant challenge is managing the sheer volume of paper involved, including such diverse documents as permits, architectural diagrams, electrical drawings, surveys and street maps.

To improve planning and oversight and encourage sustainable development, The city wanted to make documents available electronically. It started a pilot program within the technical and environmental affairs department. Representing approximately 5 percent of city activity, the department had between one million and two million records, some of which were more than 100 years old. It also had around 100 processes that relied on documents of varying kinds, sizes and formats. The department served citizens, planners, developers and contractors from a single service center located miles away from the archive where historical records were stored, making it difficult to provide timely responses to requests for documents.

Solution
The city engaged IBM and IBM Business Partner, Elinar Oy Ltd. for a phased approach to implementing IBM Enterprise Content Management software. The bulk of the work involved defining processes, creating the metadata and preparing documents for input into new automated systems. The project team also synchronized business rules to correspond with the work the country’s National Archives was doing.This was an ongoing effort because the pilot project began before national archiving norms and standards were finalized.

With the completion of Phase 1, the city had digitized new project requests. While reducing the accumulation of paper, there is still much work to do to achieve the goal of eliminating paper archives. Scanning all existing paper records into electronic format is expected to take five to seven years.

Going forward, the city is considering using IBM Case Manager software to collect and review stakeholder comments and identify and solve issues. By enabling such collaboration, the city anticipates shorter planning cycles and accelerated issue resolution.

Benefits

• Improves service to constituents, planners, developers and contractors without adding staff
• Speeds the development process with paper-free building requests and policy reviews
• Assesses environmental impacts more quickly and accurately with improved access to relevant documents and records