Criterion 6 – Don’t reinvent the wheel
Suggested activities to apply this criterion
‘Build once, use many times’
Apply reuse in decision-making: Use the Australian Government Architecture to understand the tools, capabilities, policies and standards for building government services. Identify and document how they are applied in decision-making.
Apply learnings from predecessors: Reach out to teams and agencies for their experiences and lessons creating similar services and how to apply them to other services.
Design for a common, seamless experience
Adopt open standards where appropriate: Consider how reuse and open standards can support other services across government. Where appropriate, design and build with them to bring the service to more platforms, improve data sharing capability, prevent vendor lock-in and create familiarity for users.
Reuse data where possible
Review existing data: Review the data already collected and how it can be reused in the service. Where appropriate, consider if safe, ethical data-sharing arrangements under the Data Availability and Transparency Act Scheme can be employed. Actions to leverage ethical, data-driven decision making can be found in Criteria 5 (‘Build Trust in Design’) and Criteria 7 (‘Do No Harm’).