4 Types of contract data and the evolution of data-first CLM

How many active contracts do you have across North America? 

Do your contracts have a pattern of sitting within a certain stage of a workflow? Can you accurately forecast incoming signatures? 

Out of all contracts with potential quantity discounts – what’s your percentage of adherence?  

Can you easily identify the answers to these questions with your CLM? 

The 4 types of contract data

When Agiloft introduced its exciting rebrand in early 2024, it came from more than a need for a fresh look. It was a response to a recognized industry need: a data-first approach to contract lifecycle management.  

This approach focuses not only on the housing and processing of your contracts themselves, but the valuable information held within and around these foundational business documents.  

Agiloft has broken contract data management down into four different distinct types of data found within your CLM. 

Contract content data – content data covers the important information found within the contract, such as the names of the counterparties, term lengths and conditions, important dates, etc.  

Contract process data – process data focuses on where the contract sits in your overall contract workflow and the details surrounding that stage in the lifecycle. 

Contract performance data – performance data introduces an element of analysis, where you explore how your contracts are performing against the commitments held and made within them. 

Decision support data – a combination of the information collected above, decision support data focuses on details and statistics found that can influence the way you do business in the future and can influence change in your organization moving forward. 

Now that we’ve broken down the types of contract data, what does it truly mean to have or leverage a contract data management system?

Contract data management systems 

Technology is advancing faster than most of us can keep up – so rapidly, in fact, that most experts have officially decided that we’re out of the digital/information age and into what is being called the Internet of Things (IoT) Age. How has this evolution affected Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) specifically? Let’s take a look.  

While there are obvious examples of this digital transformation, like the introduction of AI in day-to-day contracting operations, we’re first going to focus on the overarching purpose of CLM. 

Our journey begins, as most new technologies do – with a problem.  In the mid-late 90’s and into the early 00’s, the problem was clear: these filing cabinets of contracts, or on a larger scale, these giant document storage warehouses, just weren’t cutting it anymore. And thus, the digital repository was born. This technology was revolutionary at the time, with some of the more advanced technologies introducing metadata to make it easier for organizations to find certain contracts across their repository. As technology continued to advance, and businesses looked for opportunities to grow, a new problem arose: the need for automated workflow and collaboration tools. This is when contract lifecycle management burst onto the scene with the “purpose” that most are familiar with today. 

A sophisticated CLM can fundamentally change the way you do business, with workflow and collaboration tools that make the management of contracts easier. But as we’ve mentioned, as technology advances, so do the needs and problems. So now that we find ourselves in the IoT Age – what’s our new problem?  
 
The reason we look for contracts is because we need the information held WITHIN the documents themselves. Details from a contract workflow tell us valuable information on how the organization as a whole is performing. Welcome to the new generation of CLM – a data-first, end-to-end contract management system.  

Agiloft’s Data-first Agreement Platform not only acknowledges the importance of this data to the CLM user, but to the broader organization as a whole. That’s why the focus of contract data management goes beyond not only collecting that important information, but also liberating it and making it actionable, using data to make strategic business decisions. Agiloft’s Integration Hub can connect your contract data to over 1,000 systems ensuring it can be paired with other important technologies, like CRMs, ERPs, BI platforms and more.  

So, let’s look again at the questions laid out in the beginning of this article – answer all these questions and more when your CLM empowers you to perform at the next level, as a true, data-first agreement platform.