WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 20102. THE BRAZILIAN PUBLIC SOFTWARE - SPBSPB is an initiative undertaken by the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management of Brazil, in order todecrease public costs by means of new and more efficient ways to develop and deliver software whilepromoting the sharing of solutions among the public institutions.The SPB considers on its formulation the free software model of production, and moreover, overlapsother issues that borderline this concept as Economics of intangible goods, new role for the State, neworganizational models operating in network and intellectual property of goods produced in a collaborativeway. The Brazilian Public Software is made available by a portal (PSPB, 2010), a virtual environment whichgathers software - available for users to download and for its continuous improvement development underpermission - and a set of additional services offered by those entities that provide solutions such as userguidebooks, installation guidebooks, discussion lists, forums, management models and some support. Thus,the portal provides an important exchange of knowledge and of software tools, mainly those which are ofpublic interest. Currently the Portal has more than 40 thousand people subscribed, 37 software solutionsavailable, besides groups of interest. Among the current groups of interest there are 4CMBr and 5CQualiBr.The 4CMBr group of interest discusses information technology for the Brazilian Municipalities (4CMBr,2010). 4C means Collaboration, Community, Knowledge and Sharing after their Portuguese words:Colaboração, Comunidade, Conhecimento and Compartilhamento. 4CMBr was launched in November 2008with the purpose to stimulate the use of free software in the municipalities. From the use of informationtechnology, it proposes to improve the internal procedures of the Brazilian Municipalities, the quality of lifeof citizens with by offering online services, tackling the waste of public resources and time, managing andplanning expenses.5CQualiBr group of interest (5CQualiBr, 2010) concerns the subject of Quality. It has been developedwith the objective of increasing confidence in all levels of the artifacts displayed in the portal. The fifth C isfor Trust after its Portuguese word Confiança. It hosts communities interested in participating in theconstruction of knowledge devoted to aspects of quality (interoperability, test, quality of products, quality ofdevelopment processes, quality in service delivery, dissemination and sustainability).In the SPB Portal there is a group of software solutions and a group that demands services related to thesesolutions. The Virtual Public Market (MPV, 2010) is the virtual space that allows the approximation betweenthe two groups. In the MPV information is kept about the service providers, which can be self-employedworkers or companies, thus generating a catalogue of service providers and a guide for fast consultation. Theoccurrence of this phenomenon may, in theory, accelerate the development and use of the software solutions,the increase in the services performed and the stimulation of economy around each software, thuscharacterizing a new business model. Currently in MPV are registered more than 300 service providers.In the context of the model presented in this article, service means the set of activities offered by theVirtual Public Market to those who use the solutions available in the Portal SPB. Therefore, the servicesconsidered in the Process Capability Model for Services in the SPB may be: training, development,consulting, maintenance, installation, implantation, technical support, embedded software, interactiveapplications programming, mechanical and computational modeling and associated products.3. SERVICE CAPABILITY MODELSProcess Capability Models are repositories of best practices which are used as references for the processimprovement and assessment. In recent years, a set of best practices models has emerged in the informationtechnology field, with the objective of aiding companies in their structuring, management and monitoring oftheir processes performance. Among them we may mention the models of CMMI (SEI, 2006; SEI, 2009;SEI, 2007), MPS-BR (Softex, 2009) and ISO/IEC 15504 (ISO/IEC 2003). These models bring benefits to thecompanies by recognizing the competitive advantage that can be created by a process-based management. Arecent survey identified 52 Process Capability Models for different domains (von Wangenheim et alli 2010).A new generation of quality models has emerged and they are specific to the improvement of informationtechnology service processes, which are: CMMI-SVC (SEI, 2009), and SCM-SP (Hyder et al, 2006), etc. Inspite of a diversity of Process Capability Models there is a demand for new reference models for specificcontexts. It is the case of SPB, which will be detailed in the following sections.309