Suppliers understandably complain about the unreasonable terms and narrow evaluation methods used by some of their customers. They are often right to point at the failures that result from such behavior, when it results in incompetent and sometimes dishonest suppliers winning business that they have no chance of performing, or the burden of risk promotes an adversarial relationship.

In recent years, there has been a steady push for increased collaboration. Businesses encourage it both wthin and between functions and with customers and suppliers. A survey by the Financial Times discovered that employers value graduates who have ‘the ability to work in a team, to work with a wide variety of people and to expand their network’. These were, in fact, the three top characteristics.

According to a recent report, almost 14% of the UK’s law graduates who move straight into employment are working as waiters or bar staff. That probably doesn’t reflect the aspirations they had when they started in law school, nor of course where their career will ultimately take them.

In a recent blog, I highlighted the importance of a proactive approach to contract and commercial digitization. Many still hesitate – they want to know what benefits it will bring, they say they can’t obtain funding, they even ask ‘what is digitization?’. So I promised a series of case studies and this is the second of them. The core message: if you hesitate, you will have been left behind.

There is a growing movement for transparency in contracting. Organizations such as the Center for Global Development and the Open Government Partnership are at the forefront. IACCM is a contributor and strong supporter of this work since it is fundamental to our mission of ‘improving the quality and integrity of trading relationships’.

“Memorial Sloan Kettering is in turmoil over a deal officials made to share cancer patient data with a for-profit artificial intelligence start-up.”

Although senior managers understand that contracts are important, most do not grasp the challenges – or potential contribution – that are associated with contract management. On the surface, it seems such an obvious and straight-forward activity – and therefore struggles to gain investment.

In 2006, at an IACCM Americas conference, a group of senior attorneys ran a mock trial to test the enforceability of electronic signatures. They concluded that, subject to due process, such signatures are enforceable.

It’s 25 years since big corporations started to automate and streamline internal data flows and communications. Given the impact that these changes had, it doesn’t take a brilliant mind to recognize the scale of cost and inefficiency associated with today’s semi-automated external communications and the virtual absence of automatically shared data. Essentially, the success of an organization such as Amazon is in large part because it has automated commerce, stripping out cost and simplifying the customer and supplier experience.

At the start of this week, I had two very different conversations. In each case, the conversation was with the global head of the Commercial & Contract Management function and in each case they were handling major outsourcing and services agreements. But at this point the story starts to diverge. They are summarized below: