I will be giving a presentation at SDForum on Contract Lifecycle Management Systems. Below is the overview of the presentation and the slides.
Presentation Overview
A corporation consists of its core competency and a set of relationships. These relationships are with other corporations - e.g. suppliers, partners, customers - as well as individuals - e.g. employees, contractors. A contract is a structured representation of the relationship, and needs to continue to change as the relationship evolves.
Today, users create contracts as unstructured documents, using unstructured processes. The terms and conditions are then manually extracted and input into various transaction (order, shipping, delivery, payment, etc.) systems, thereby limiting the affect of the contract on ongoing interactions. In addition, current transaction systems do not have capabilities to capture contracts accurately, or to reflect the nature of the changing relationship.
The presentation will provide an overview of the requirements, various approaches taken, emerging relevant technologies, as well as challenges that lie ahead in designing solutions for managing lifecycle of contracts.