Already home to 400,000 residents, the City of Surrey is among Canada’s fastest-growing municipalities. At its current rate, Surrey will become the largest city in British Columbia in less than 10 years. Such dynamic growth means a great deal of work for the Planning and Development Department and the Information Technology Division.

How has the “City of Parks” met the demands of high-volume recordkeeping and permitting processes, while maintaining great public service? The City’s IT and Planning and Development team answers that question—and reveals how the City won an award for its approach—in this issue.

The Planning and Development Department issues 100 building permits per week, generating anywhere from 60 to 100 records related to each property. At a minimum, 6,000 records flow into the department’s records management system on a weekly basis. Using a paper-based system, staff spend hours copying Plan Checkers’ notations from every building plan reviewed onto archival copies.

Beyond the records room, the real-world significance of those numbers comes into focus. The Fire Department depends on fast access to building plans to pre-plan for maximum firefighter safety. Building Inspectors, other agencies and the public frequently request building records that were previously stored on microfiche. Plans buried in cabinets of microforms frustrate front counter staff with long searches, not to mention finding information that’s hard to read due to decades of handling.

Any solution would have to address these issues, and also meet the criteria of the Information Technology Division. It would have to be easy to use to encourage fast staff acceptance. It would provide a low-maintenance, Web-based thin client, and it would have to serve as a foundation for integrating other applications and extending benefits citywide.

The solution began with a simple request for a large format scanner. Recognizing the regulatory ramifications of scanning records and depositing them on a network without a comprehensive records management plan, the City’s Manager of Administration and Special Projects seized the opportunity to lay the foundation for an enterprise information management solution. While the Planning and Development system would be deployed to deliver immediate benefits to that department, it would also serve as a pilot project for the eventual citywide solution.

After earning buy-in from the City’s senior management, the IT and Planning and Development project team forged ahead with their Laserfiche® archived digital records project, dubbed CARS (City’s Archival Records System). CARS has met or exceeded all of the team’s initial goals to provide a high degree of value to internal clients and taxpayers.

Reducing costs and improving upon paper-bound processes were chief among those goals. On those scores, CARS has achieved an award-winning level of success as demonstrated by the British Columbia Public Sector Technology Award the City recently received for the system. The department estimates reductions in search and retrieval costs alone at $30,000 to $50,000 annually.

Accurately capturing building plans submitted with permit applications is another key goal that contributes to the ongoing success of the system. The City determined that a mix of in-house and outsourced scanning best suited their needs. Laserfiche allows commercial building plans scanned by an outside service provider to be easily incorporated into their digital repository, while department staff capture residential plans with their in-house scanners.

Authorized users then can access digital building plans from their computers using a Web-browser interface to search for the civic address or words in the full-text record. It’s so easy to use that Building Inspectors, initially resistant, now “love it,” says CARS/Laserfiche Project Manager Tina Chahal, and it requires minimal support from IT. The system also has reduced potential liability by eliminating the error potential inherent in the old manual copying process.

Taxpayers and other departments also realize the benefits of the new system. In-house scanning saves customers the cost of submitting duplicate copies of building plans, and thanks to the 50% reduction in plan- review and notation-processing time, the public enjoys faster turnaround of permit applications. First responders in the Fire Department no longer have to wait for a digital tracing process to get current building plans into their CAD system.

IT Manager Geoff Samson says he’s optimistic about expanding throughout the city, given Laserfiche’s usability and ease of integration. Ms. Chahal agrees, attributing much of their success to thorough planning, with emphases on engaging end users early on and careful indexing to promote smooth implementation and scaling up. “We’re a lean, innovative IT department,” she says. “We push our applications to the nth degree.”

Tags: disaster recovery, microfilm, State and Local Government, Web Access

Posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 4:15 pm under Government Newsletter, Municipal Government, State and Local Government. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.