Technological Products or Services: New Standards Guidelines for the National Public Sector

Provision 1/2023 of the Federal Office of Information Technology (ONTI), under the President´s Chief of Staff Office, was published in the Official Gazette on October 5, 2023. The Provision updates the ¨Technology Standards for the Public Administration¨ (ETAP), approving version 26 and repealing ONTI Provisions 2 and 3 of 2021, which had approved a previous version of ETAP.

The ONTI's main objective is to create policies to transform and modernize the Argentine Government and, through the ETAP, provide general standards for promoting quality and efficiency in the provision of Information and Communications Technologies services (ITC).

The ETAP serve as guidelines for the public sector to prepare bidding terms and conditions for technological products and/or services. Here, “public sector” means the federal administration, including centralized and decentralized agencies, state-controlled corporations and companies, public entities expressly excluded from the federal administration—i.e., any governmental non-business organization with financial autonomy, its own legal standing and assets, where the federal government is a majoritarian shareholder or holds the majority of the decision-making power—and trust funds wholly or mainly integrated with goods or funds of the federal state.

The ETAP provide guidelines and minimum criteria the Public Sector may consider to design technological projects. These guidelines extend through the stages of surveying and sizing needs, preparing technical specifications for each contract, and the relevant adoption of technologies. The ETAP seek to promote open requirements that respect the principles of promoting competition among interested parties and competition among bidders, avoiding technological dependence on any of them.

The ETAP guidelines establish a set of recommendations and criteria to consider when preparing the technical requirement of a specific technology. For example, for data transmission services via a telecommunication networks, bidders must be able to encrypt and decrypt traffic to ensure the privacy and security of the managed information. Also, within the sphere of software development, embedding a diverse array of security measures across all stages of development is advised. This includes minimizing the amount of data stored in computer systems and clearly and explicitly stating the rationale for storing it. Likewise, in terms of software development, the guidelines establish that state agencies must verify services provide functions for querying records and managing logs, as well as tools for tracking actions and incidents in the contracted infrastructure and/or platform.

According to the recitals of the Provision, the aim is to update the previous standards which, due to the speedy innovation of ITCs, must be periodically reviewed to ensure their contents reflect the latest advances. It also seeks to provide general recommendations for software development in the public sector as well as for sizing information storage on tape using automated robotic loading.

The Provision became effective the day after its publication. As of that day, agencies of the public sector must apply ETAP Version 26 in the technical specifications of all projects for developing, innovating, implementing, making compatible, and integrating ITCs.