Over the past few years, the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) has been promoting and exploring the possibility of using public software rather than creating a new system or issuing a call for tenders to acquire one, with the aim of making optimum use of government resources and to avoid “reinventing the wheel”. The term “public software” is used to describe any piece of software that has been developed using government resources and that should therefore be available for the different government organizations to share.

This good practice is complemented by collaborative software development techniques, i.e. ones that coordinate the efforts of different stakeholders and use collaborative work to achieve better results for all involved. This not only leads to a significant reduction in costs but also feeds into a network of knowledge and makes public sector staff more professional.