You may not think that business intelligence software would be necessary for a city's authorities to know whether a building has been inspected, but that is the case in New York City. Until the NYC Fire Department installed a BI system from IBM (NYSE: IBM), it apparently kept no data detailing which buildings were inspected when.

"We had no way to know whether we may have inspected one building eight times but missed another building altogether," Don Shacknai, first deputy fire commissioner, told Baseline magazine's Samuel Greengard.

The fire department is in charge of inspecting hundreds of thousands of properties every year, Shacknai reports. With a pilot of IBM's Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities underway, firefighters are notified when it's time for an inspection. "Now, instead of simply conducting inspections on a cyclical basis, we're able to examine risks and the urgency of an inspection," Shacknai said.

The BI system will also enable the department to share information between firefighters and others who are responsible for different kinds of inspections. The Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Buildings have inspection duties as well.

For more:
- see Samuel Greengard's article at Baseline

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