The Problem

Tedious paperwork for citizens and no data to quantify building energy consumption for governments

Austrian citizens who want to apply for building permits or housing subsidies were required to fill out up to ten pages of forms on paper. Permits depend on how energy efficient a building is and - in case of monetary aids - on the financial situation of the individual. Applicants had to submit approximately 15 additional documents of proof via mail to qualify for a permit.
The process of submitting and manually inspecting the paperwork was tedious and usually took several weeks to complete. It was hard to understand for citizens and hard to track for the federal agencies involved in granting the permits. In addition, federal governments could not quantify how new construction laws and funding policies improved the energetic condition of buildings* because the building data found on the application forms was not stored centrally.

The Solution

Online applications, centralized data storage and automated workflows.
Under my leadership at Big Energy Data we introduced paperless online applications for housing subsidies and building permits in the federal state of Salzburg in 2013, working closely with the involved government departments. Gradually we integrated funds for residential buildings, for property developers and publicly owned buildings into the application. In 2015 the product was rolled out in 3 other federal states.

Impact

We introduced e-government and reduced paper work.

Our product enabled citizens and government employees to handle applications for building permits and housing subsidies completely online.

We reduced processing time for applications significantly.

We reduced the average processing time from starting an application to a granted permit from several weeks to a few hours by providing online applications, automated checks and a workflow tool for the involved departments.

We made it possible to measure impact.

We implemented a centralized data storage for applicant and building data with APIs to our analysis software to measure the impact of new laws and policies that were created to reduce the energy consumption of buildings.

User-centered design processes, agile iterations, Balsamiq, HTML, PHP, MySQL