Integrate and adapt technology

Point 9 of the Technology Code of Practice (TCoP) explains how you should plan the integration of new technology with your existing systems, and apply extra checks when adopting technology that is new or unproven.

Why you should integrate and adapt technology

In government, new technology usually has to work alongside legacy systems, existing skills, support arrangements, and established governance processes. If you don’t integrate new technology properly, it can create compatibility gaps, unplanned downtime, and systems which, in the future, lack support.  

When the technology itself is new or unproven, it can fail, be discontinued, or turn out to be the wrong tool for a need that more mature technology would have been better suited for.  

Technology choices should never be made in isolation. This TCoP principle exists to enable you to make informed integration and adoption decisions by considering both your existing estate and the maturity of your chosen technology.

What good integration and adaption looks like

You have successfully met this principle if:

you can show how a new technology will work alongside your existing infrastructure, support model and governance, and not just that it works in isolation

you can describe your target architecture and transition path from where you are now, using a recognised approach, such as baseline, target, and transition architectures (which are used in frameworks such as the The Open Group Architecture Framework)

you’ve broken integration into smaller, manageable increments rather than one large change, so that problems surface early rather than at go-live

your configuration management is defined, and component and integration testing happens automatically as part of your build process rather than being manual or only carried out at the end  of the process

where you’re introducing emerging technology, you can always show that you have considered a mature alternative first, and can justify why the emerging option was chosen