Top 5 Tips for Effective Intellectual Asset Management System Evaluation
Posted by Jerry Lamigo on Mon, Mar 08, 2010
The market for Intellectual Asset Management - IAM Software is fragmented with many smaller organizations providing a wealth of features and functionality. This makes it difficult for corporate IP departments to choose the best software for their needs.
A number of our customers started their selection process looking at over 30 software vendors. Each vendor claimed to have the most comprehensive solution. The selection process was long (sometimes over 2-3 years), frustrating and confusing.
Here are the top five tips that will help you reduce the number of vendors for your evaluation and to separate the wheat from the chaff:
1. Usability
Without this, nothing else matters. If your users will not adopt and use your selection, it's a waste of time and effort. You should look beyond the glitz and try to understand how your users will accept the new IAM system. In short, the user interface should be simple and intuitive for the first time user.
2. Accessibility
If the software is not accessible via standard web browsers such as IE, Firefox, Safari or Chrome, discard it immediately. To make your IAM system deployment successful, you need strong adoption from your inventor community. In many organizations, inventors use different types of computers, operating systems, and browsers.
Your Intellectual Asset Management application should support such variations seamlessly.
3. Configuration
Ask you vendor to demonstrate how to add a new field of your choice. Most vendors who claim to have the most configurable application will hesitate to do this. If your selected software does not have tools to do these basic tasks, you got yourself locked into the vendor's roadmap.
4. Searching and Reporting
How good is IAM software if it can't provide good searching and reporting tools? It is frustrating to many users that they can't easily get to the data that they entered a few months ago. Ask vendors to demo their searching capabilities and make sure the searching and reporting tools are part of the basic system and do not require a PHD degree in rocket science.
5. Integration
If you have been previously involved in the deployment of IAM software, you already know it. The world of "docketing in a black box" is over for corporate legal departments. It is critical that your software can be easily integrated with other systems inside your organizations such as HR, accounts payable, active directory, etc.
Lecorpio IP Asset Management solution has been designed for strong user adoption, is accessible on all browsers, and provides robust configuration capabilities. Please don't hesitate to contact us for a free consulting session to help you better plan for a successful Intellectual Asset Management software project.
Image courtesy of findyourrainbow.com
