«
»

Is a smart building permit an oxymoron?

Image courtesy of wikipedia

What about a planning permit application podcast upload?

Is the permit process being left behind in our digital age? Is it the legislation? Is it the building surveyors?

David Swinson, BDC’s director, was involved in the SPEAR project for the Building Commission (with Stephen Kip from Skip Consulting) about 7 years ago. We reported that we were 7 – 10 years away from online smart permits.

Well, that 7 years is here now and … the system is … still not ready for smart building permits! In the US they have had a go at SMART permits, but it is still really about putting the paper stuff on the internet. Not very smart!

Do the current Building Information Modelling Systems (BIM) offer the answer? Are we headed for digital signatures on BIM? Maybe? So what are the current road blocks?

  • Is it about digital security? – not really, we could digitally stamp a building permit as a secure pdf file today, plus we could add any conditions on the drawing as secure text.
  • Is it about having a paper record – well … you can always print off the drawing – then it’s a paper copy.
  • Is it about collection of information? – again, not really, systems like Aconex are more than capable of collecting and compiling on line all the relevant project information.
  • Is it about the checking of documents and drawings? – no …. here at BDC we use Bluebeam PDF revu to measure lineal length, area, volume – we could just as well use Autocad or Microstation too! Maybe even 3d drawing software?

So tell me again why we don’t have an online building permit system?

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 4th, 2010 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Architecture, Building Surveying. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Is a smart building permit an oxymoron?”

  1. John says:
    June 28, 2011 at 4:51 pm

    Hi there, we offer online building permits and storage of all files digitally. All our files are digitally signed and stamped and we run about 200-250 application per month…very very efficiently. We had a meeting with some government department, but they were too busy trying to design a system that would do everything…again probably another 7-10 or even 20 years away…..and life in the real workd goe on.

    Regards

    John Harrison

  2. janelle says:
    June 30, 2011 at 11:17 am

    Hi John,

    Thanks for your informative post.

    Regards,
    Janelle Smith

Leave a Reply