I was talking to Phil, a former colleague of mine, last week and he was expressing his frustration over trying to build a contracts management software application on top of SharePoint. (Lucky me, just in time for a blog entry.) The way he told the story was hilarious, one of those Dilbert-type experiences that makes for a good laugh for anyone who has worked in an office for more than a week.

But underneath the laughter was a good amount of despair and Phil was feeling his position might be on the line. Most of his issues were around people not knowing what they really wanted the application to do and a failure on everyone’s part to understand the content management solution’s strengths and weaknesses.

No one really owned the process from the business side but lots of people had opinions – some very strong opinions and for very good reasons. Some were worried about the process of creating a new contract, some about missing legal obligations, some deeply concerned about risk mitigation, version control and compliance. These issues had been brewing through several corporate near-misses and one outright crisis that I won’t document here. One of the executives demanded the problems around contract creation and management be solved once and for all.

A manager had the idea of using SharePoint since they had it “lying around” and gave that idea to my friend and expected him to work some magic. Everyone on the team seemed to believe this was a viable option and faster than trying to buy a product or design a custom solution. After all, there was business pain that had to be fixed fast.

Weeks of research and many months of design iterations later and they were no closer to consensus, much less a working application.

After listening to this for a few minutes, I couldn’t help but chime in. The issue comes down to not having a complete understanding of the problem to be solved and the supporting belief that throwing technology at a process will automatically improve it. The solution hinged on people being able to effectively collaborate on a process with quite a few steps and the problem was different based on the role of the person looking at it. The initial creator of the document had one mission. The next person who had to validate information and sign off had a different goal. And so on, and so on, from start to finish. A big issue was that the workflow wasn’t static, there were many possible variations and exceptions based on a whole host of conditions.

The entire team was deeply concerned about creating reminders and escalations since a big part of the problem they were trying to solve involved issues falling through the cracks. Many attempts to diagram and customize the process had not resulted in a workable solution.

Finally, after several frustrating months and many arguments, he called me looking for some advice. The whitepaper we posted here, is our attempt to help Phil and others like him, get business value from their enterprise content management platforms. We decided to share with all of you with the hopes it spares you from Phil’s long hours and frustrations.

Prodagio Software products have just been included in two new industry analyst reports by Gartner and Forrester. Both firms list Prodagio Contracts as a leading offering in the Contracts Management space. In their latest research, Forrester has recognized our ability to provide both the benefits of content management and transactional contract capabilities.

Forrester Research – Prodagio Contracts

Predictions 2009: ePurchasing Market, Andrew Bartels, 30 March 2009.

“Imagitek leverages its EMC Documentum relationship to move into CLM. Imagitek has had an offering in the EIPP space for a number of years with its Prodagio A/P product. In 2005, it added a CLM product, Prodagio Contracts, to its procure-to-pay suite. Prodagio Contracts has 30 clients, including global, publicly traded corporations, state and local governments, and international clients. The product includes a flexible data model, business processes, integration technology, and an enterprise content management component built on EMC Documentum. As a result, the product combines contract terms-and-conditions architecture for integration with transaction systems and clause-level control over contract creation, negotiation, and management of contract obligations with the leverage of a leading ECM platform. Imagitek has also recognized the SaaS trend and delivers both hosted and on-premise solutions.”

Gartner – Prodagio AP

Procurement and the Oracle E-Business Suite, Debbie Wilson, 5 March 2009.

Gartner highlights Imagitek as a best-of-breed alternative to Oracle’s Procurement Applications. Prodagio Software is particularly relevant against Oracle in situations where multiple ERPs and backend systems exist or for shared services where consolidation across business units is required.

We are delighted to announce Prodagio Contract’s debut ranking on the 2008 Gartner MarketScope for Contracts Management. This report highlights the top vendors in the contracts management application space. In a field of 24 entrants, only 13 were selected by Gartner as having met the criteria needed for inclusion.

Prodagio Contracts debuts in its first year on the list with strengths listed as:
• References report routine use for tracking and documenting revisions during negotiations.
• Robust workflow with concurrent review steps, rules-based variations and the ability to add reviewers ad hoc.
• Fuzzy search, search within search, search of attachments, full-text search.
• Post-execution support including milestone tracking & alerting, schedule tracking, documentation of related correspondence and calendar integration.
• Security with access restricted by business division, contract type, user role and department.

The full report is available to Gartner clients as G00161534 at www.gartner.com.

Prodagio A/P was covered in a new research paper by Gartner, released on December 11, 2008. The paper, entitled “Accounts Payable Invoice Automation” discusses how companies can augment their ERP AP processes to include more of the upfront business processes, including document and electronic transaction capture, workflow approval routing and analytics. According to Gartner, this is a ripe area for achieving value. Gartner clients can find the document G00163833 at www.gartner.com.