A pothole, three phone calls
Residents don’t think in departments. A resident sees a pothole on her street and wants to tell the city once. Instead she has to work out whether it’s Public Works or Transportation, find the right form or number, and call back a week later to ask what happened. The 311 agent who takes that call can’t tell her, because the status lives in the Streets division’s work order system and 311 can’t see it.
Behind the counter it’s no better. The agent retypes the request into the case system. Streets copies it into its work order system. If the pothole is next to a broken water main, a second department gets a second copy, and nobody owns the whole thing. The gaps get filled with shared inboxes and spreadsheets, each one useful to one team.
How a request moves
One catalog for everyone. The resident uses the portal; the 311 agent uses an intake screen during the call. Both pick from the same list of services and fill in the same form, so a request looks the same however it arrives.
The address decides the route. The form checks the address against the city’s parcel and district data. That match picks the owning team, the council district and the service level, without anyone looking it up.
The department works in its own system. The workflow creates the record in Streets’ work order system, or the code enforcement case system, or wherever that service lives. Crews don’t learn a new tool.
Status comes back. As the department updates its record, the status flows to the resident’s request page and to the 311 agent’s screen. The resident gets an acknowledgment with a request number and expected timing, by email or text, as she chose.
Slipping requests surface. When a request nears its service level, the team lead is alerted and the escalation is recorded, so the district office can see it before the resident calls a council member.
What the city gets
Every request in one place, by service type, district and age, regardless of which department system holds it. Adding a service means adding a form and its routing, not buying another system. And requests that cross departments have one owner and one history.
The screens on this page come from Cedar Harbor, a fictional city we built on Kinetic to show the model. The state and local government page covers permits, licensing and records requests on the same base. The same request workflows extend to service request management for city staff, and paper forms at the counter are a natural next step for form automation.