Mais dissertação

Ai pessoal, vou colocar o abstract da minha dissertação enquanto não atualizo o blog direito!

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The Brazilian economy is the largest in Latin America. There are over 2,000 purchasing units in the Federal Government and more than 30,000 employees regularly engaged in procurement activities on a regular basis (2004). Pregão Eletrônico is an e-Reverse Auction (e-RA) practice undertaken by Brazilian Government in all its levels (federal, state and municipality). This study investigates criticisms of its efficiency and accessibility of information and proposes a tool to support public procurement price comparison.

The design, development and evaluation of this public procurement search and comparison tool (Publicprices) are described in detail. Human-Centred Design (HCD) methodology was adopted for development of this tool. Complementary elements of Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Rational Unified Process (RUP) are used in system documentation both of which are used extensively in IT-related projects and widely employed by software development teams. This will assist in attracting the support of IT stakeholders and developers to any future commercial implementation of Publicprices.

The Literature suggests that e-P can foster regional development through SME participation. Reduction of public expenditure can be achieved through increased transparency in transactions and access to information by government or the public. However both the literature and exploratory interviews suggest that transparency is not always the main objective of public bodies. Rather, other factors such as addressing skills gaps and standardising procedures are priorities.

Existing e-P solutions in Brazil were analysed in detail for basic requirements. Scenarios, based on the literature and interviews, were then used to help specify additional functionality in the Publicprices prototype. These scenarios were validated with a small group from each of the four groups of stakeholders (government, supplier, media and tax-payer). These were then developed into use cases and implemented in a prototype based on PHP and MySQL, using a sample set of real data (708 typical public procurement records). The main use case (keyword search) was successfully carried out by almost all of the 54 evaluators, although a second more complicated use case (price comparison) was only successfully completed by a minority.

However, the evaluation suggests that a majority were sufficiently impressed by the additional functionality that they would be willing to pay a monthly fee. Further, at least 60% in each stakeholder group found the system easy to use. We believe that if Publicprices is adopted by the Brazilian Government for Pregão Eletrônico it will consequently realise massive savings in public expenditure for the benefit of the general public.

Suggestions for future work include developing the Publicprices prototype tool into a commercial solution and identifying strategies to improve the prospects of the system being accepted by decision makers.