3.5. Cohesiveness Name: Cohesiveness Statement: Departments shall present a consistent and unified face of government through a common and integrated approach to service delivery. Rationale: • Government services are presented to clients in a consistent and cohesive manner. This means that clients of government services should only need to present a piece of information to government once. Similarly, clients will be presented with a common look, feel and experience regardless of what department service or channel they are accessing at the time. This presentation of a consistent government face will reduce the impact of internal government change (for example, department/program amalgamations and restructures) on clients, and potentially reduce the flow on costs of such changes. Adoption and continued use of a service by clients will depend, to an extent, on ease of use enhanced by consistency of service delivery. • With the introduction of common services and the reduction of duplicate services, the Government/Department has the opportunity to reduce costs. Implications: • Departments and Programs will need to collaborate in the development of services. This will require open sharing of information, cross-department/program planning, and understanding of whole-of-government service channels, segments and lines of business. • To achieve consistent and interoperable service across the whole-of-government, the government, department and its programs will need to agree and use common technologies, open industry standards and open architectures. • The department and programs will need to align service delivery with whole-of-government policies, strategies and frameworks. • Departments and programs will need to reduce integration complexity. • Departments and programs will need to incorporate the seamless use of interoperable applications, data and information across various sourcing models and operating environments. References: • Australian Government Enterprise Architecture Principles (PR-2)