As part of a project of rethinking and improving the municipal taxes service experience offered to residents of East Jerusalem, we had the pleasure of hosting a leading team of service providers from the Jerusalem Municipality in a co-creation workshop.
The workshop was attended by more than 20 employees of the Jerusalem Municipality who explored the insights of the research conducted by Whiteboard in the city during the last two months.
During the study, dozens of in-depth interviews and observations were conducted with residents at East Jerusalem, as well as with service representatives at the municipality analyzing the needs and the points of view of the residents arising from the current service experience.
In the workshop, municipal employees, together with the Whiteboard team, created hundreds of new ideas to redesign and to improve service. The activity resulted with new, different, service scenarios from which work plans will be crafted that will affect directly the service provided to residents of East Jerusalem in their municipal tax payments.
The approach of implementing service design in a wide range of public sector is increasingly adopted in around the world. More and more municipalities are looking to Design Thinking as an approach to understand residents’ needs and to prototype interventions. Furthermore, there is a shift from focusing on using technology to increase transparency to focusing on citizen participation, participatory, democracy, service delivery, leadership practices and more.
