You might have permitting, inspections and licensing software today. But does it integrate with your organization's Geographic Information System (GIS) in real-time? There are distinct advantages when your permitting, inspections and licensing software can integrate with your organization's GIS. Below we will explain specific ways in which you can drive more efficiencies and have your staff make more informed and consistent decisions when your software can leverage the rich data available in your GIS system.
When your customers submit applications to you, how much manual time, energy and effort do your staff use towards ensuring that the address and parcel information being submitted by your customers is valid? If your staff are unable to validate the address/parcel when receiving and performing intake on an application, does your organization waste precious staff time and resources working with incorrect location data? Are there instances when your organization has spent a significant amount of time only to realize that the address or parcel actually lies in a different jurisdiction?
Performing real-time validation of addresses and parcels by connecting to and querying your organization's GIS prevents problems like this. Your customers are prevented from moving forward if they provide addresses/parcels that do not exist in your GIS. By automating validation early on in the application submittal process, you are ensured that you only receive applications for addresses/parcels that are actually within your jurisdiction.
In addition to validating addresses/parcels, by querying your GIS, there are opportunities to retrieve rich GIS information for addresses/parcels that can then be used for automatic decision making. As an example, while validating an address with GIS the permitting system can find out if that the address is in a historic district. This information can be stored along with that application/customer submission and when intake is being performed by county staff, the permitting, inspections & licensing system can automatically pull in the Historic District Review as a required review.
And that is not all, the data that is retrieved and stored with a customer submission/application can then be used for reporting. We have seen this play out many times when our customers are looking to group customer applications, permitting activity, inspections, etc. by their Zoning Districts or by their Council Districts.
Finally, your GIS department likely already maintains many Feature Layers with rich GIS data. For example, it is likely that your organization's website has an interactive map that already allows your organization's customers to interactively query information contained in various layers in your GIS system. Examples of Feature Layers include: Addresses, Parcels, Flood Plain information, Historic Districts, Zoning Classifications, Sewer Lines, Water Lines, School Districts, Fire Districts, etc. When your permitting, inspections & licensing software is integrated with your GIS, you can visualize ALL these layers in a toggle on/off fashion in the context of a customer's project/case. This means that your staff do not need to leave the system to access relevant information for a project/case - the system makes relevant GIS system for projects/cases accessible within the system.
To summarize the points above, there are 4 clear benefits to having your permitting, inspections and licensing system talk to your organization's GIS. Many systems today operate as silos. This increases the burden on staff since they are responsible for manually determining relevant geographical information about each address/parcel. Staff productivity and efficiency can be increased all while making it more convenient for them to do their jobs. The organization is also benefitted by the consistency and standardization that can be brought into each decision made by staff because relevant information is automatically brought into the system from GIS.
*** SagesGov is a best-in-class permitting, inspections and licensing system that can deliver these benefits and more by talking to your organization's GIS systems. Please here to learn more.