Share, reuse and collaborate

Point 8 of the Technology Code of Practice (TCoP) explains how you should look for existing government technology, data and services to reuse or build on, and to make your own work reusable by others.

Why you should share, reuse and collaborate

When you work in isolation, you risk building a solution for a problem which has already been solved elsewhere. You should always ask if what you’re looking for already exists in government, and you should design your solution so that other teams can easily find and reuse it.

Duplicating work across government wastes time and money. Reusing and sharing technology benefits everyone.

You have successfully met this principle if:

To successfully reuse, share and collaborate, you should always scale the depth of your pre-build check with the size and risk of what you’re building.

For example, a lightweight look at communities and existing platforms is proportionate for small or highly context-specific work, but a fuller systematic check (which includes the API Catalogue and a market scan) matters more for anything with significant reuse potential across government.  

If you find that you do need to build something new, this is when you should consider whether your solution should be made reusable for others who face the same problem.