Simple architecture guide
Connect the resident experience without replacing every municipal system.
Civic Touch separates what a service means, what is happening now and where the work is completed. This keeps each responsibility clear and makes future channels easier to add.
A clear division of responsibility
Service definition
Touch Catalog is the source for stable service information: who a service is for, how it is found, what information is required and what kind of result it produces.
Current requests and records
Civic Touch runtime services own active requests, status, milestones and records such as bookings, enrollments, licences, permits, memberships and passes.
Service fulfilment
Each request follows one configured fulfilment approach. Civic Touch can send the work through a municipal workflow, or connect directly to an external service that owns the fulfilment and result. The user experience does not invent statuses or decisions.
One service definition, several experiences
- Resident Touch: a mobile experience for residents and eligible non-residents.
- Resident Web: public service discovery for anonymous visitors.
- Touch Assistant: guided chat and voice assistance within Resident Touch.
- Agent Touch: desktop and tablet experiences for community service and back-office fulfilment.
- Touch Catalog: desktop service design, configuration and activation.
- Touch Deploy: controlled environment configuration and cross-environment deployment.
The channels receive the same active service definitions and stable coded values, then present them for the needs and permissions of each user.
Connect through managed service adapters
Municipal systems remain authoritative for the information and transactions they own. Managed adapters provide a consistent Civic Touch connection for common needs such as waste schedules, address-to-ward resolution, facility availability, payments and externally managed services.
Environment-specific endpoints and protected connection details are managed outside public service definitions. Civic Touch refers to a stable connection name and resolves the right value for development, test or production.
Activation and deployment mean different things
Activation
Within one environment, approved service definitions and portable municipal configuration become available to the resident and agent experiences without a separate approval step.
Deployment
Moving a release from development to test or from test to production is a controlled action with the approvals required by the municipality. Environment-specific values are prepared in the destination before the release is made available there.
Trust is part of the design
- Municipalities and environments are separated.
- Access is based on identity, role and service purpose.
- Residents see only information and actions intended for them.
- Community agents act for an identified resident or eligible non-resident.
- Back-office staff work from assigned tasks and permitted decisions.
- Important service and administrative actions are recorded.
- English and French experiences use the same service meaning and stable codes.
This guide describes the intended first-release architecture. Detailed assurance, hosting and integration documentation will be confirmed with launch partners before production use.