Towards a Software Product Management Framework for the Brazilian federal universities

Studies have shown that most Brazilian federal universities do not fully comply with e-government standards and fail to deliver software that meets the requirements and expectations coming from different sources at the same time: stakeholders, institutions, and the federal government. One of the main issue in this scenario is the great effort spent on the development of tailor made software instead of standard products meant for a wider range of customers, such as product lines, for instance, specially because many institutions face problems related to increasing demand and technical staff shortage. Software Product Management (SPM) is a discipline proposed to govern software products to ensure that business goals are achieved and resources are responsibly utilized. Since federal institutions can benefit from such type of management strategy, we present an investigation aiming to understand the main differences between the actors and business processes proposed in SPM reference models and those present in public universities when it comes to deliver software products and services. Accordingly, we propose a high level SPM model for federal universities which was adapted from a well known SPM reference model. Results and discussion provided in this paper can shed light into how to tailor a detailed SPM model for this specific domain.