What Is Journey Mapping, and How Is It Used in State and Local Government?

What Is Journey Mapping? 

State and local agencies deliver all manner of services to meet citizens’ needs, from healthcare to unemployment insurance, trash collection and access to food and clean water.

A journey map starts by focusing on who is seeking a service and how they begin their interaction with an agency to access it, says John Spirko, senior executive enterprise architect for state local government and education at ServiceNow. 

“There are different capabilities depending on who they are,” Spirko says. “It might be an elderly person who has somebody acting on their behalf with a power of attorney, or it could be somebody who’s very tech savvy who can use things like AI and come through.”

The other side of the citizen persona coin is all of the work being done on the back end by government IT, benefit systems and government workers to fulfill that service request, he says. “And then, what can we do in between to make that journey better, make the fulfillment journey better for that consumer, in automation or user experience or process?”

Journey maps, whether they are digital flow charts or printed on paper, focus on improving the user experience. They are ultimately rooted in “being able to take complex processes with many steps, potentially many outcomes, many opportunities for people to intersect that process and different people, and visualize it in such a way that allows users to quickly absorb what the process looks like,” says Matthew Saniie, chief data officer for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in Illinois.

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How Can State and Local Agencies Map the Citizen Experience?

The first step to mapping a citizen experience is to focus on the citizen who’s accessing a service; specifically, how they initiate a transaction or interaction with a government agency, Spirko says.  

The second step, he says, is to look at what’s happening on the back end on the government agency’s side to automate the next step. In other words, what happens after the process starts to provide the citizen with information about what they need?  

ServiceNow, in particular, often uses what Spirko refers to as a service blueprint, which is broken out into different “episodes” or steps in a customer journey. There are two layers to the blueprint: above ground and below ground. 

Above ground, there is a series of customer actions, or what someone is actually doing in the real world — going to a website or office, filling out a form, making a payment and so on. Those episodes are directly connected to human touchpoints, which can be both technological and physical (people or things). 

Below ground are actions that are invisible to the citizen but that happen at each stage of the journey, performed by government employees. Connected to those are systems, processes and enabling technologies that need to be in place for the actions to occur.

For example, if a citizen is reporting a pothole, Spirko says, ultimately a public works employee will be dispatched to fix that pothole. But there are mechanisms, such as websites or 311 systems, that citizens interact with to report the pothole, request the service and receive a response from the government agency. 

“So, we’re kind of making sure that as part of the process, even though they’re not seeing it as part of the journey, that they’re aware that these other things are happening outside of what they see,” he says.

It's critical for any agency that is doing journey mapping — and any company providing journey mapping services — to be cognizant of all of the systems that a process moves through, Spirko says. For example, there may be a range of legacy authentication and eligibility systems for different agencies, whether it’s a tax agency, the department of motor vehicles or a benefits agency. 

“So, you have to make sure that you understand where you fit in, what part of the journey you're taking and what part of the journey is being handled by other systems,” he says.

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How Can State and Local Governments Create a Journey Map? 

In 2019, Cook County partnered with Code for America to map out a process to expunge the convictions of tens of thousands of those eligible, following the passage of a state law.

Saniie says that the State’s Attorney’s Office thought it understood how the expungement process would work, but when Code for America created a journey map for it — which included the experiences people would go through, how they might be thinking and feeling at each step of the process and how the process could be improved based on those experiences and emotions — "we actually got a better sense of how expungements worked, and then we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is actually a better way to see it.’”

Following its work with Code for America, the State’s Attorney’s Office created its own journey map that’s a flow chart of how people proceed through the criminal justice system if they have been arrested and charged with a felony. Court processes revolve around creating and moving documents from place to place, Saniie says, with papers being stamped, moved and signed by clerks and judges.  

The flow chart is more about visualizing for citizens the points at which a case might take a turn, in terms of arraignments, pleas, hearings, shifting to a diversion program or going to trial —  “Just breaking down all the pieces and trying to understand how things can move from A to B,” Saniie says. 

In Montana, ServiceNow used journey mapping to improve the state’s 211 system, which was established in 2005 to provide a single point of access to public health and human services resources. The result was a system that asks citizens a series of questions to determine which services they are eligible for based on their housing situation and household information. 

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Can Journey Mapping Improve Citizen Services?

In June, the city of Reno, Nev., partnered with ServiceNow to launch DROPS (Direct Resource Outreach & Placement Service), a mobile application designed to reshape how outreach workers help unsheltered individuals in the city.

The application lets workers input demographic information to help them quantify the impact of outreach efforts and understand the population they’re serving. It also lets workers capture a history of interactions to create a consolidated digital case file; access a catalog of common actions with third-party service providers; and use reporting and analytics to gather insights and trend data to inform decision-making.

Saniie says journey mapping can provides a new level of clarity, even for those who have been running government processes for a long time but who might not understand how processes evolved with new supervisors or changes in administration. 

“It increases the speed with which we can pass along this institutional knowledge, and it reduces the amount of oral history that has to be given, where you might say one thing to me, but I hear something different,” he says. “And we start to play that game of telephone, tweak it ever so slightly and cause some future confusion.”

Journey mapping tools help improve how customers experience government applications and services on the front end, Spirko says. Even better, the process of creating a journey map can help government leaders understand how a complex process — for example, assessing whether someone is eligible for unemployment insurance — might be simplified by removing or combining steps. 

“We can improve the look of it, make a better form, but really what agencies want to do is improve the turnaround time,” Spirko says. “A customer journey is that time until they receive their benefit or service, and that’s what we look to cut down right away.”