In the early years, the Authorium team had a vision for a no-code platform, with a low cost of entry for government customers, where they could get going in a matter of weeks – never having to wait a year for an IT solution to be delivered.
As the company grew, Authorium supported the California Department of Technology to build a product that would help them achieve better results in their work.
Today, states from coast to coast are experiencing that reality and achieving measurable results with Authorium. With the recent launch of Authorium Direct, we’ve expanded access further – to enable government teams at all levels to use our platform with fewer barriers than ever before.
Procurement Beginnings
We first stepped into the national spotlight as a leader in a procurement innovation called challenge-based or outcome-based procurements – a practice where a need is described, but the solution is not specified. We were working with a number of cities, when California’s governor issued an executive order that launched an initiative called Requests for Innovative Ideas, or RFI2. This action opened the doors for hundreds of procurement officials and workers across the state to connect with our team and technology.
We heard the challenges from government agencies using 40-year-old technology; almost universally, agencies pushed for a more agile approach. Authorium Co-CEO, Jay Nath, recalls:
The [outdated] technology was not supporting their business goals and objectives and we saw that there was a need and opportunity to give them a product that could help them collaborate and develop those complex documents.
We started there and we’ve grown since to support very complex procurements and multi-billion dollar procurements. It’s dozens of evaluators and thousands of pages of documentation – so we can manage really complex procurements. But we also saw a need from our customers for goods and commodities and services that are not competitive – that are direct. That’s what led us to Authorium Direct.
Pain Points
Through our collaborations with government agencies, we heard about the plethora of inefficient patchwork tools and software sprawl. Teams were using upwards of six or seven different technologies, communicating over email, among Word documents, and in Excel files.
As agencies evaluated potential solutions on the market, they found expensive source-to-pay solutions that might take a year to kick off implementation – and could cost anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million to get started.
There had to be a way to get that work done at a tenth of the cost and 1/20th of the time.
Enter Authorium Direct
Before Authorium could bring a new solution to government teams, we had to ensure that it would:
- Enable teams to achieve intended outcomes, ie: deliver measurable results
- Fit within current budget structure and the time frames to make an impact
- Launch within a number of days to enable visibility, control, and oversight into expenditures.
We know that departments are skeptical of products that sound too good to be true, because our team truly understands government processes. 60% of our staff have worked in government themselves. By combining our deep public sector experience with innovative technology, and listening to our customers, Authorium Direct came to fruition.
Three ways that we use technology to achieve these results are:
- Leveraging our no-code platform to create an intuitive and easy-to-use interface.
- Accelerating timelines. For example, we have ways to import documents from Microsoft Word in an easy way. We have standard templates, so teams never have to start from scratch.
- Employing joint application development. We work with government agencies in real time to make adjustments – be it approvals or review flows – to ensure rapid deployment of the platform to the teams that need it.
To hear more about Authorium Direct and find out what’s next, watch the webinar, Streamlining Purchasing with Authorium Direct.
