There is a counter on Industrial Avenue in Ottawa, Canada, where people applying for a business licence sometimes make six, seven, eight trips before they get one. And that is not the worst case scenario.
We recently hosted a knowledge building session on service design for the City of Ottawa. The room was packed with people from bylaw and regulatory services, community and social services, and the teams working on service requests and service transformation.
One participant from bylaw services shared how residents navigate getting a business license: Applicants arrive, wait in line, present their documents, and almost invariably something is missing. So they leave to go and get that “something”, and come back. Each trip lands during business hours, which means closing up or leaving somebody else in charge, while paying rent on a space that cannot open yet and staff who cannot yet work.
What is missing varies. A signed lease. A site plan, which lives with a different department. Insurance, which comes up with nearly every applicant, because the coverage the City requires and the coverage an insurer treats as standard are not the same document.
Here is what matters about those trips. Everybody involved is doing their job correctly. The clerk applies the rules as written. The inspectors inspect. The applicant brings exactly what they were told to bring, learning at the counter each time what they should have known before getting in the car. Nobody is careless and nobody can see the whole thing at once. That gap is the specific problem service design exists to solve.
What service design actually means
Start with the word service, because the definition this field uses is anchored somewhere different from the everyday one. In ordinary use, a service is something an organization provides, which quietly stops the story at the organization’s edge. Service design defines it from the other end.
A service is any set of actions that enables someone to achieve a goal.
That does some work immediately. It puts the person’s goal at the centre instead of the department, the form, or the software. Our business owner’s goal was to open. The licence was a step toward it. Every step that did not move them closer to opening was, from the only perspective that counts, waste.
It also explains why doing this well earns so little credit. When a service works, people barely register it. Nobody posts a review about a transaction that took four minutes. Experience becomes visible when it breaks, when somebody has to work hard at something that should have been ordinary, which is why the feedback any city receives skews so heavily toward complaint. The absence of praise is not the absence of success.
And there is a version of this story where the City delivers a project on time and on budget while the applicant still makes eight trips. Those two facts sit together comfortably. Delivery gets measured inside the organization. The eight trips happen outside it.
Why service design matters more at the municipal level
Municipal government is the layer of government residents actually touch. Federal and provincial services show up a few times a year. Municipal services show up constantly: water, waste collection, transit, recreation, licensing, housing support, long-term care, the condition of the road on the way to work.
Ottawa’s 2026 budget runs to $5.2 billion in operating spending across more than a hundred lines of service, and the average urban homeowner is paying $166 more this year than last. Residents pay in whether or not they think of it in those terms, and they draw services down in return.
Which makes a city resemble a membership business more than most public institutions do. Costco and Netflix members pay a recurring fee and judge the whole relationship by what it is like to use. Residents pay in and judge their city the same way, on whether the thing they needed actually worked. The difference is that a member who has a bad year cancels and goes elsewhere. A resident stays, keeps paying, and absorbs the cost of a service that does not work. That raises the obligation rather than lowering it.
Mapping one municipal service end to end
We talked part of the licensing journey through out loud that afternoon, using what the people in the room already knew.
It does not start at the City. It starts at a bank asking whether the licence is in place before releasing funds, or at an insurer, or at the province, where an application for a used car dealer licence stalls because the municipal one has to come first. Staff described applicants who find out the City is involved at all only when somebody else’s process stops moving. Each of those contacts is a touchpoint, meaning any moment a person comes into contact with your service, including the ones you do not run and cannot control.
Everything the applicant can see is the front stage. The pages on ottawa.ca. The drive out to the Business Licensing Centre at 735 Industrial Avenue. The walk-in line, which the City’s own website warns may form outside the building. The clerk at the counter decides whether the application can proceed.
Counter staff will tell you that applicants often arrive with everything in a folder. A stack of loose paper–out of order, coffee stains–handed across the desk with some version of I do not know what I am doing.
Running underneath all of it is the line of visibility, which is probably the single most useful idea in service design. Above the line includes everything the user, in this example, the business owner, encounters when interacting with the City. Below it, everything that makes their experience possible and that they will never see.
Below that line is the backstage, where the licence is actually processed. Eligibility review. Payment processing, which is a system rather than the terminal the applicant taps. And the coordination of inspections and approvals across zoning, building services, police, public health, fire services and property standards. Six departments for one licence, which can take up to six weeks to issue.
Deeper still are the support processes, the work that keeps backstage functioning. The administrator who keeps the payment system online, without whom the clerk cannot take money and the applicant makes a ninth trip. The writer who maintains the licensing pages. The manager who approved the budget to update those pages this year instead of two years from now.
Somebody raised the recreation side of this while we were mapping. The same building might host a licensing appointment, a fitness class and a wedding on the same afternoon, three groups of people with completely different needs and no awareness of each other, sharing one set of doors, one parking lot and one booking system.
The moment that landed hardest came from a team who described themselves as an internal support function, two layers back from the resident, and placed themselves accordingly. Somebody pointed out that to the department they serve, they are the front stage. Both descriptions are accurate. Departments are constantly each other’s customers, which means a city has more journeys running through it than it has services, and staff experience belongs on the map beside resident experience rather than in a separate conversation about workload.
Service blueprint vs journey map
What we were assembling out loud that afternoon was the beginning of a service blueprint, and it is worth being precise about the difference between that and a journey map, because the two get used interchangeably and they do different jobs.
A journey map follows one person through an experience. Their steps, their touchpoints, what they are trying to do, how they feel at each stage. It is drawn from the outside in, from the user’s side of the line of visibility.
A service blueprint is the sequel. It keeps the user journey along the top and then extends downward, connecting every step to the front stage interactions, backstage actions and support processes that make that step possible. Where a journey map shows you that the applicant waited three weeks, a blueprint shows you which six departments were involved in those three weeks and where the handoffs sit.
Blueprinting earns its cost when a service spans multiple channels, multiple touchpoints or multiple departments, which describes most of what a municipality does. For a single simple transaction, a journey map is usually enough.
Where to start when you run more than a hundred services
The first instinct in the room, once the licensing journey had been laid out, was that the fix is an online portal.
Then somebody described a service that had already gone online, where the result was more work for the applicant rather than less, because they used to lean on counter staff to get them through it and now they are on their own with the small print. Somebody else pointed out that whatever went wrong there, nobody had asked what putting it online would actually mean for the people using it.
That is the pivot the whole discipline turns on. A portal may well be the right answer for licensing. It is still an assumption until a business owner has been asked, and the applicant with the coffee-stained folder is going to have a different answer than a Gen-Z’er who’s a digital native. Both of them are residents. Both are entitled to get their licence.
So the honest first step is research, which means sitting down with people who have recently been through the service and asking what actually happened.
The question that always comes next, and came up that afternoon, is one of scale. The City runs more than a hundred lines of service. 311 fields everything from roadkill to licensing complaints. Nobody has the budget to research all of it. So where does a team start?
Start where the complaints already cluster, because you know where that is. Teams generally can name their worst service inside ten seconds. Business licensing came up in that room because it is already one of the loudest things in the inbox.
On the research itself: you will need personas, meaning evidence-based profiles of the different kinds of people using a service, grouped by what they are trying to achieve and what gets in their way rather than by demographics. A first-time entrepreneur and someone on their fourth business look like two personas until you notice that in the specific context of getting a licence, they want the same outcome and hit the same walls, which makes them one. Start with assumption-based personas so your team has a shared language in the room, then go and validate them. Skipping the validation step is how organizations end up designing confidently for people who do not exist.
Then slice the work. A full licensing portal might genuinely be a three year project, and three years is a long time to deliver nothing. Ask the people you interviewed to rank what matters most and you will frequently find that the top-ranked item is information, not transaction. Knowing what to bring before getting in the car is a content problem on ottawa.ca, and it is measured in months. Ship that, put a short survey on the existing process so you have a baseline, and prototype the bigger thing with a handful of real applicants before committing to a citywide release.
What service design will not fix
It will not resolve conflicting mandates at the top of an organization.
When two portfolios are pulling in different directions, or a service runs across departments and no one owns it end to end, blueprinting will surface that with uncomfortable clarity. Everyone in the room will see it. Surfacing a problem and having the authority to fix it are different things, and service design supplies the first one only.
The related risk is that each department optimizes for its own dominant persona, sometimes at the direct cost of residents another department serves. A permit designed around the business that gets it can produce a sidewalk that somebody in a wheelchair cannot use. Both teams did their jobs. Only a shared view catches it, which is why the idea that came out of that session was a community of practice: shared personas, a shared archive of journey maps, and people from different departments in one room looking at a service end to end. Nobody needs permission to start that.
Start with the toolkit
If any of this sounds like your week, request our Service Design Starter Toolkit. It has the persona worksheets, the journey and blueprint templates, a prioritization matri, and a host of other tools to plan, engage, and design services. Take it into your next planning meeting and map one service end to end, starting with whichever one you named in ten seconds.
If you would rather work through it with your team in the room, we run training and capacity building programs, and have delivered them for a number of public service organizations.
We are Design Centered Co., an Ottawa-based design and innovation consultancy working across the public sector since 2019, with the Government of Canada, crown corporations, the Province of Ontario, municipalities and national nonprofits. Our goal on every engagement is to strengthen your team capabilities to build a more capable and resilient public sector.
