PincusCo spotlight: Rocky rollout for DOB’s new filing platform

By Atticus O’Brien-Pappalardo

Over the last few months, the New York City Department of Buildings has rolled out phases of its new construction filing platform, called DOB NOW: Build. The interface will ultimately replace the legacy system, known as BIS Web (Buildings Information System).

And it’s not going well, according to a non-scientific survey PincusCo Media conducted last week. According to respondents, the new platform is difficult to use, not intuitive, and reduces transparency. The impact is not only felt by those in the contracting industry. For curious neighbors, real estate investors or others, with the rollout, there are now two platforms to check to see if there is work being planned on a particular building or tax lot. Put another way, the city no longer has a single source of information on construction — it has two.

DOB NOW is not new, and in fact it’s been a secondary filing platform for several years. But since December the agency has accelerated the shift to the new platform.

Part of Phase 1, in December of 2020, saw the filing of all Alteration 2 or A2 jobs (known as Alteration jobs in DOB NOW), transition to the new platform. Then in March, Phase 2 of the rollout began. The second phase saw new building jobs and Alteration 1 or A1 jobs (known as Alteration-CO jobs in DOB NOW) transition to the new platform.

To better understand how the platform is being viewed by industry professionals, PincusCo Media created and distributed a 10-question survey to our readers asking for general feedback with questions such as “Do you find the new DOB NOW platform easy to navigate?” and “Have you experienced any issues on the new DOB NOW platform that were not occurring on BIS?” The full survey can be found here.

Participants were also given the opportunity to provide additional information on their experience with the new DOB NOW platform. The anonymous responses are available to read at the bottom of the story.

PincusCo recognizes that this is not a scientific survey, and we will not be publishing figures from it, but we felt it was important to report since the responses were overwhelmingly negative

The integration of the new platform is part of the city’s Building One City plan, which aims to improve customer service and increase access to information. The plan came after Mayor Bill de Blasio called for a fundamental reform at the Department of Buildings in 2015. The city describes the platform as “an interactive, web-based portal that will enable building owners, design professionals, filing representatives, and licensees to do all business with DOB online.”

With that being said, the overwhelming majority of the survey participants found the new platform to be the opposite of an improvement, with one calling it “duplicative and disjointed bad tech” and another “unnecessarily complicated”. One participant went as far as to say “My life has become a horror show as the new DOB NOW platform is full of errors.”

The majority of respondents indicated they found the new platform difficult to navigate, file job applications, and access new information.

PincusCo also reached out to the New York City DOB, to see if they were aware of the criticisms, and if they would like to respond to them.

Andrew Rudansky, DOB press secretary, provided a statement that the agency was, “proud of the work already accomplished in rolling out DOB NOW… We also understand that getting used to a new system can pose challenges for our customers, and we are listening to feedback on ways to improve the user experience as we continue to add more functionality to DOB NOW.”

The entire statement from the DOB is available at the bottom of the story.

PincusCo has also experienced frustration navigating and reporting information from the new platform, ranging from data being less easily accessible, to the interface crashing more frequently.

It has not been uncommon to receive the following error message, after significant periods of waiting for the page to load, when attempting to search for a filing plan with a specific job number:

Below is the full list of unedited, anonymous comments received by PincusCo when participants were asked to provide additional information on their experience with the new DOB NOW platform:

• please provide training and post more youtube videos

• instead of knuckleheads in NYC hiring a tech company to design and create a new platform for the DOB, which is the only City agency that earns over 100m profit to the city annually, instead, they should have put together a team of senior active DOB executive, mid management, examiners, clerks, and private industry Structural and Mechanical engineers, active active architects, active expediting firms, zoning and consulting firm, when u have a team like that, which has years of active daily interactions withe the old BIS system, and have seen and bumped in all sorts of problems, issues, system shortcoming, and improvement ideas, and you add a software design platform design company to to this group you have a winner, but DOB and NYC are to short sided, so they hires an outside software company who won some kind of bid and are trying to design a platform for a huge city agency with the most complicated municipality zoning/code wise in the USA so it will take months and years to deal with the issues and shortcomings of this new platform, no private company would ever survive such a fiasco

• interface is way too boxy, and you have to click on things to find information vs BIS where you could just scroll down

• Everything from New York City feels like the third world..why not test these systems with high school kids who are great on social media and ask them what they think? and who cares about these systems when the DOB senior types are all completely corrupt? The level of approvals in contravention of rules is up more than shootings since COVID

• Dob now seems harder to use…maybe I just need training.

• seemed glitchy and would bring me back to the homepage after trying to go back one page. Frustrating to use

• My life has become a horror show as the new DOB NOW platform is full of errors. I on a daily basis have to calm anxious clients who are not getting their permits while I have no one to speak to at the DOB. The response to every problem is to fill out a DOB NOW help form. Issues that could be resolved with a 5 minute conversation now take days to resolve over DOB NOW. The system inhumane, unaccountable, and ineffective.

• All the city agencies are terrible. takes them weeks to get back to you with nonsense responses.

• DOB Now and Covid has increased overall approval times. Not all delays can be attributed to Covid. Site navigation is not intuitive for infrequent users.

• DOB NOW currently does not allow searches for new job filings by Filing Date, and it does not allow searches for Permits Issued by Permit Issue Date. Hopefully these search functions are added to DOB NOW in the future

• totally unintuitive interface. good only for expeditors who have time to learn

• I wasn’t aware of DOB Now, and am concerned that information is now there and not where I am used to looking!

• It’s duplicative and disjointed bad tech

• It is unnecessarily complicated. It is NOT intuitive at all. For those of us with multiple buildings it is incredibly inefficient and difficult to keep separate accounts for each building.

The entire statement from Andrew Rudansky, press secretary with the NYC DOB:

We are proud of the work already accomplished in rolling out DOB NOW, the online self-service system that offers improved accessibility and transparency for the public. Over the past year, we have been working tirelessly at the Department to speed up the implementation of DOB NOW, and in just the last few weeks have added new functionality including the ability to file applications for new building projects and submit requests for Certificates of Occupancy. We also understand that getting used to a new system can pose challenges for our customers, and we are listening to feedback on ways to improve the user experience as we continue to add more functionality to DOB NOW.

• For members of the public that have questions about using the new system, the Department encourages them sign up for one of our regularly scheduled online industry training sessions or watch one of the many pre-recorded DOB NOW webinars.    

• DOB is receiving feedback from the industry through these industry training sessions, and through our own online surveys. We have already implemented multiple changes to the system based on this feedback.   

• DOB NOW is replacing a legacy mainframe system, Buildings Information System (BIS), which was created in the 1990s and has many limitations. The reliability and speed of the DOB NOW portal represents a major improvement over BIS. 

• The way information is presented in DOB NOW is evolving as we make progress with the platform, include adding more business transactions. Our goal is to improve the filing process, by collecting electronic data, compiling related application information, and eliminating the need to have DOB paperwork scanned and uploaded.