The Holy Grail of Document Assembly is Coming

There's a favorite question that people love to ask when they're pondering whether document assembly will work for them. It usually goes something like this:

"That's great, I answer all the questions, the system spits out a great first draft, I send it off to the other side, and their lawyers mess around with the fine print of clauses 11 and 23. Now, can I shove that document back into the document assembly system and change a few of my previous answers?"

And the response used to be:

"Aaaah... well... no... sorry."

Another variation of this problem invloves contracts that are up for annual renewal. The first draft comes out of the document assembly system. All the key points of the deal are saved. But during final negotiations, the lawyers agree a few hand-crafted changes to the boilerplate clauses. In 12 months time, that contract is up for renewal:

"Can we call up last year's answers, change the dates and a few other things, and spit out a renewal contract that keeps the negotiated boilerplate clauses we agreed last time?"

This problem has frustrated document assembly users and vendors alike for many years. Any random negotiation to the text of a document (ie, changes that weren't built into the business rules of the template) breaks the connection between the automation system and the final draft. Without some way to "round-trip" the negotiated edits back into the document assembly system, you're stuck with a mismatch between what that system knows and what the final document actually says.

So, you can re-use your saved answers via the document assembly system, but you'll have to remember to manually retype any negotiated changes to the text of particular clauses.

Or, you can re-use the negotiated Word version of the agreement, but you can't use the document assembly system (which means there's a risk that certain clauses are now out-of-date).

You just can't do both.

For many, solving this problem is the holy grail of document assembly.



But there's good news. The holy grail is coming. When Exari V5 ships in the first half of 2007, a big part of this problem will be solved.

In simple terms, any document produced from Exari which then goes through a process of negotiations (typically in Word) will be able to be "round-tripped" back into Exari in a way that preserves any negotiated changes to the text of particular clauses. This means you'll be able to save the answers given during document assembly, as well as the edits made during negotiations, and re-use them against the same template, or even against an updated version of that template. So it doesn't matter that the template has changed since last year. You simply load it all up and what's relevant will be used, and the rest will be ignored.

If this problem, or some variant of it, affects you, we'd love to hear from you. Every real world example helps us to fine tune the solution.

Welcome to the Engine Room

For a while now we've been writing a blog called Pactum, in which we wax lyrical about contracts, agreements and all the fine print in between. Pactum deals mostly with news items (good and bad) which are relevant to people who spend their days writing, negotiating and managing contracts.

With the Engine Room, we're taking a different approach. We're blogging about a technology known as document assembly, with a particular (some might say shameless) focus on our own product, Exari.

The aim is to share our insights and experiences of real world document problems and what (if anything) can be done to solve them. We'll do our best to strip out the marketing fluff. We'll try to keep it practical and to the point. That's the plan, anyway.

Why "Engine Room"?

At its core, Exari is a document assembly engine, in the same way that Google is a search engine. With Google, you feed search terms in and the engine sends back relevant results (all going smoothly). With Exari, you feed answers in (typically via a web interview) and the engine sends back documents tailored to your needs.

It's almost like magic. Which is why some people call it a document wizard, I suppose.

Anyway, we hope you find the blog useful. Questions and comments are always welcome.

Are Governance Standards the Solution to IT Contract Blowouts?

An attention-grabbing article in The Australian IT starts with a couple of IT contracting horror stories, but quickly drifts off on a rather dull voyage through the alphabet soup of IT governance standards. Never mind that your contract might be full of holes. What you really need is AS-8000. And AS-8015. And AS-8016. Or AS-8018. Or BS-15000. Or maybe ISO-20000. And ISO-27001, of course.

Whatever the solution, the horror stories are classic tales of deals gone wrong:

In the first case, a sales guy won himself a big fat bonus and a nice tropical holiday by underbidding to land a mission-critical government project. Surprise, surprise, the project failed, the vendor lost $14M, and the government won a $5M damages claim to cover the costs of their manual work-around.

In the second case, a technology deal was done over a few beers in a London pub. It was supposed to cost $2M. It ended up costing over $12M. The manager responsible was fired for secretly milking funds from various accounts to bankroll his project.

Will ISO-20000 save you from these horror stories? Who knows? But a tightly drafted contract with a clear statement of work would be a good start.