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Saturday | 22 November, 2008
CIO
Enterprise Value Awards - Michigan Dept of Transportation
Stephanie Overby 05 February, 2002 12:00:00

A financial partnership between a state government department and a software company was unprecedented. Contract negotiations between the Michigan attorney general's office and Info Tech's lawyers dragged on for nearly two years as they searched for a politically acceptable solution. "We had to focus on MDOT's business, which is building roads, not marketing and distributing software to local agencies and consultants," explains Couto.

MDOT and Info Tech stuck through the negotiations because they saw the value of FieldManager to others in the construction business, says Couto. The final agreement allowed MDOT and Info Tech to co-own the source code. Info Tech got the right to sell the software but had to dedicate licensing fees paid by other states for the further development of FieldManager. The contract also granted Michigan's state and local transportation agencies a perpetual license to the software, mandated that MDOT approve any future changes to it and paid MDOT royalties from sales to private users. It was a far cry from the standard contract that gave the vendor all control over the software and all the financial benefit from its sales. "If we had done it the usual way, we would have had to pay to make any changes," says Couto.

Fox and Couto also had to convince MDOT's legions of end users to embrace FieldManager. "One person took the laptop and said, 'The only thing I'm going to do with this is put it behind my truck and back over it,'" recalls Fox. MDOT overcame the opposition by including users at every stage of development and letting FieldManager sell itself. "We told them to take the software for three months and let us know what they thought about it," says Fox. "I never had anyone come back and tell me they wanted to go back to the old way." Today, some of the early resistors are FieldManager evangelists. "If you went to some of those people who had been the most reluctant and tried to take the software away from them now, you'd get hurt," says Daniel Rutenberg, senior systems analyst for the construction and technology division.

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CIO Live Podcast #79: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires Part II
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