Code Department Digitalization Offers Pathways to Advance Approvals
The International Code Council provides jurisdictions with the tools and strategies to implement digitalization.
Communities are increasingly under pressure to help deliver construction projects quicker and enhance customer service in the permitting and approvals process. Digitalization offers opportunities to enhance code department processes without sacrificing building safety.
What is Digitalization?
Digitalization is the process of converting analog processes to digital workflows that result in greater efficiency (i.e. time savings, cost reductions), improved communication between parties and reduced manual errors and paper waste,
With support from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the International Code Council (ICC) has developed a Roadmap for Code Department Digitalization, identifying the stages of digitalization and providing jurisdictions with resources to identify their current stage and strategies to progress. Strategies for Filling Digitalization Gaps, the companion guide, provides jurisdictions with important considerations and recommended approaches for overcoming common challenges.
The Roadmap identifies four stages of digitalization:
- Digitization is the foundational step in which jurisdictions move paper documents and data to digital forms. The tasks in this stage support later levels of digitalization.
- Essential Digitalization creates the basic digital workflows for jurisdictions’ code/building departments, including project tracking, management and application processes.
- Advanced Digitalization expands on the essentials, offering more specific digital processes that create more efficiency for code officials and department staff with project-specific tasks, including digital plan reviews and remote virtual inspections.
- Aspirational Digitalization offers further transformational strategies that offer advanced tools for use by jurisdictions, citizens, and other key stakeholders that can offer design planning resources, or artificial intelligence supported workflows.
Progressing through the stages requires deployment of various digital tools and strategies. In addition to specific tools identified in the Roadmap, ICC has numerous solutions including:
- Providing access to codes digitally through Digital Codes Premium
- Supporting remote virtual inspections through resources like
- View PostICC Innovation’s software solutions including
About the Author
The International Code Council is a nonprofit association that provides a wide range of building safety solutions, including product evaluation, accreditation, certification, codification and training. It develops model codes and standards used worldwide to construct safe, sustainable, affordable and resilient structures.
