• Develop open, collaborative and innovative relationships with partners.
• Identify, collaborate and work with other organisations and people who are a natural part of the service landscape for your users.
• Use widely accepted practices, techniques, frameworks, components, data, free or affordable services, and open standards.
• Use cross-agency and private sector partners and vendors to assist with innovative approaches.

Why it matters

As more services are created with reuse in mind, it opens up opportunities for others to:

• reduce inconsistency of experience across services
• build on existing knowledge
• reuse pieces to compose new services.

Contribute back to the broader service delivery system by enabling other agencies, and the private and community sectors, to deliver public value by building on or extending your work.

Through reuse the government system can optimise return on investment, avoiding duplication of cost, effort and risk, and increase ability to respond to changes in policy or user needs.

Collaboration with third parties (private, community and non-government sectors) and other governments offer increased opportunities to deliver tailored, value added services for users.

Users are increasingly expecting a seamless experience across government services, and to be able to access services with a consistent look and feel, regardless of which agency or provider is offering them. Consistency across services supports user trust and helps to establish a trusted government brand for service provision.

How to meet this principle

As a minimum you should demonstrate how you:

• start the design process by doing an environmental scan of what is currently available, not immediately seeking to build from scratch.
• map out the data, information, transactions and business rules required to meet your user needs and identify existing sources (e.g. APIs exposed by other services or as open data)
• identify and consider what commonly accepted methods, tools, platforms, components or processes developed to support other services you can use to support your work, and understand the potential benefits or caveats to the reuse of these
• use open standards, open source and public cloud offerings, particularly open tools that are accessible and have a strong developer community supporting them
• consider broader use than your specific service delivery by keeping data, information and transactional models as simple as possible and look at what others are doing in this space
• document any APIs your service exposes using common API documentation tools, and provide examples to allow others to develop re-uses of your service
• consider open sourcing your work
• consider where it’s appropriate to openly release the data, information, transactions and business rules you have created for your service delivery.

Rules, requirements and directives to follow

• Cloud services
• Assess the risks of cloud services
• Declaration on Open and Transparent Government
• New Zealand Data and Information Management Principles
• New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing Framework — Software Extension
• New Zealand Government Open Access Licence framework (NZGOAL)

Guidance

• API Standard and Guidelines
• Open data case studies
• Open data toolkit
• Potential future states for government service delivery