In 2013, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development accepted Colombia as a candidate to become an active member of this privileges countries group. If Colombia accomplishes all the requirements for membership requested by OECD, it would be part of “the best practices club”, where countries with better perspective and better performance in social and economic fields help each other to improve their public politics quality, which means more investment, more employment, more capability.

There had been great progress in some areas along these two years. One of the greatest progress made in Colombia is related with IT investment. With help of ICT ministry and FITI, some programs were developed to help entrepreneurs to create businesses around IT technology, programs to capitalise IT professionals which offer free certifications, free scholarships for MBA and PHB degrees related to IT industry, I+D+I, just to name a few ones.

An info-graphic emitted by ICT ministry for the last four months of 2014 shows how IT technology has improved its use and capability to coverage almost the whole country. Also, statistics from the same source show how GDP had behave in a decade thanks to IT investment.

So things look good for Colombia in IT subject, but there’s a long road to follow and good quality software production has been the need nowadays.

In Colombia software investment had grown up around 43% in the last decade, estimated in USD 6’200’000,000. Today, exists a lot of demands for software production in Colombia, many companies decides to offshore software production because of the lack of companies with good quality software production or because they are too expensive, So they decide to outsource with Indian or Chinese companies with some maturity in software production and maybe because they are cheaper ;).

On the other side, the great news is that this situation is changing, we as local software producers have a big social responsibility on what we do and we’re doing a lot of improvement in quality of software production.

Software Engineering Institute a.k.a SEI, emitted four months ago a report that keeps me motivated and dedicated to get better in this business (and also proud to be a colombian :), yeah I love my country). Colombia got the first place as the country with more software development companies which applies the best practices in software engineering in south america, according to the Capability and Maturity Model Integration a.k.a CMMI. This means Colombia is getting mature about the way it develops software and it’s making it more competitive in the business.

This is a reality, Colombia is developing good quality software applying the best practices according to SEI. I hope the number of software development companies in Colombia with good quality software production keeps increasing as we follow a continuous improvement process, and maybe someday when Colombia becomes an active member of OECD would be prepared to be the reference in software development.

Keep Learning, Keep applying…