Let Me Know When this Prediction Expires
November 23rd, 2004 by Adam Cuothe
On CLM in 2005–Andrew Bartels of Forrester Research:
Contract life-cycle management (CLM) applications will experience rapid growth of 40% in demand in 2005, driven by the growing desire of enterprises to manage contract creation, negotiation, and compliance on an enterprisewide basis, to help ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and to capture savings buried in contracts with suppliers and sales or licensing revenues in contracts with customers or licensees of intellectual property. While supplier relationship management (SRM) and customer relationship management (CRM) vendors will make inroads with process-specific contract management modules, specialist vendors who offer enterprisewide CLM solutions will experience the strongest growth. Attracted by the strong growth in CLM, enterprise content management vendors will make their first forays into CLM but will experience little success in 2005 until they build up adequate capabilities through acquisition and internal development.
Since the birth of the US’s Sarbanes-Oxley Act, all the software providers seem to be touting their new methods for helping companies comply. Everyone wants to comply. Well, I suppose. It makes sense that it’s pulled in for the notion of contract life cycle management as well. I find it interesting that the topic of contract management comes up every few years. For a while the hot thing was CLM based in EAM, which works because often contracts coincide with the reception, use, and disposition of an asset. This is true at least with physical assets, most IT assets, and digital assets perhaps present some new nuances on the situation because nobody can really agree on how best to deal with the murky realm of digital assets and “intellectual property” stances. Anyway, Bartels mentions the utility in “…capture savings buried in contracts with suppliers and sales or licensing revenues in contracts with customers…” right-on except I take a bit of umbrage on the word “capture.” It reminds me more of the way these systems are marketed… sure you can use the to identify such savings potential, but acting on it is an entirely different story. The main failure point with contract management systems is similar to the failure of many CRM systems, it really requires sweeping organizational process changes. People need to have methods to act on this information and the organization needs to be structured in such a way as to respond to this action.
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