Our Code Compliance series features perspectives from industry leaders.
ABOUT
San Luis Obispo
INDUSTRY
Municipal Building
Code Enforcement
RESULTS
My name is Michael Lowe. I started as a commercial carpenter when I was eighteen. Just graduated high school, went right into an apprenticeship program and got to do that across the country for about a decade. So I got into the construction industry because I see it as a puzzle that I can solve. A decade after being in the field as a commercial carpenter, I transitioned to being a building inspector for local municipality in the Midwest.
What I found was that the higher up in the organization that you go, the more complex projects that you get to work on, the more difficult the puzzles become.
These are problems that actually affect the lives of people every day. What does building in a certain community look like when there's a dire need for housing? How can we create a process that's efficient for a community to grow in a sustainable way? These are the problems that you get to experience in the the building code compliance sector, particularly at the chief building official level.
Why is it so hard to build?
Yeah. And someone with with a background in the trades, I actually wouldn't say that it's hard to build. I think that the act of building, the construction process is actually the easiest part of it, because of all the planning that goes into it before you actually get materials on a job site. So the building code compliance industry is long overdue for efficiency improvements because the industry hasn't caught up to the modern world.
I think everybody knows that the solution here is in technology.
The industry is also, at the same time, broadening. There are more requirements than there ever was.
There are more pages to the code books than we have ever seen, and there are more people involved in the process than ever before. And so, the problem again – it's not just simply communication. It's, just in general, all these things that are affecting the overall efficiency of the process.
I'm curious if you can give us a short narrative of you say it's getting more complex – there are more and more people involved compared to how it used to be. Why has that changed? Why is it becoming more complicated today?
The building code industry, naturally, is reactive.
As building officials, we don't predict the types of hazards that are reflected in the code. Those types of hazards are actually experienced, and then inserted into the code as a response.
And so, as we learn more about the built environment – about how people utilize spaces, what their unique needs are – as people's needs change, as cities' needs change, so does the code. And so, that is an ongoing, ongoing issue that needs to be continually addressed in order to stay ahead of the curve, or to get ahead of the curve, to improve efficiency.
Where do you see it going in 5 years? Why is it so important to you?
Yeah. In the next five years, what is most exciting for me is to see technologies like Ichi incorporated into the industry that I grew up in and love, and how it's going to really advance and change the industry.
And, using Ichi, how has that changed your day-to-day?
So, using Ichi as a building official really changed my life. It quite literally alleviated several pressures on a building official's life in that regard. But at the same time, it changed the entire environment of a building department.
I think Ichi is going to get us the housing that we need quicker.
The problem is getting from a general plan – where you have 3000 units to build out and actually getting them built out. The demands on building departments are becoming increasingly unbearable for building officials.
They are being inundated with emails – hundreds, if not thousands, on an annual basis. They just don't have the time to meet the needs that are being imposed on them. If you have a tool like Ichi, it really solves a lot of those problems. And it's not just a solution that is going to take place over a period of time – it's a solution that comes tomorrow. Ichi has given me as a building official a tool to empower my staff to meet those needs of the community.
Right.
It could be project specific, it could be code related, it could be something that a building official has never even considered in the two decades that they've been in the industry. And what Ichi does is it gives you that information, it shows you where to find that information – but more than that, it empowers you to deliver an answer with confidence.
It also changes the way you feel about your job. When you're buried under work, and you're spinning your wheels, you're not happy to come to work. The the morale of a team decreases substantially.
But when you can use a tool like Ichi – where you could take what would require 2 hours to answer an email, and now it only takes 15 minutes – and you don't have to worry about the accuracy of spelling, it takes out the other pressures that this industry doesn't really have time to address, and it allows you to really focus on the customer.
Sean is is the senior plans examiner, but he's also the only plans examiner. And, what I saw with Sean when he started using Ichi was that his knowledge base and his understanding of how the code worked increased overnight. It was incredible that an employee, who as a chief building official I was having to work with 2, 3, 4 hours a week just to help him get through plan review, was now reduced down to 1 hour a week – where he was leading the conversations.
Can this industry meet its demands without tools like Ichi?
No. Where this is going is designing buildings – code-compliant buildings – in real time, so that an architect can have, really, a design that meets all of the 40.000 codes and is compliant, and the jurisdiction is there to regulate on a, like, higher level. What I personally had prior to seeing Ichi was a very bleak outlook for an industry – quite literally changed overnight for me.
