Going on a long trip as a driver, you must plan your route, consider factors like weather or road conditions, and ensure you have enough fuel and time. Overall, the better and more detailed your plan, the higher your chance of reaching point B safely and on time.
Drawing parallels with the board, think of your company as a vehicle and decision-making as the road to success. Here, your car has multiple steering wheels (for each director). Therefore, all drivers must work harmoniously and make decisions wisely to reach their destination, which is often a challenge.
Explore a board portal and see that even with dozens of helms your way will be smooth and safe!
What is board software?
It is a multifunctional platform explicitly created for directors, executives, administrators, and secretaries. With it, they get a secure document repository, collaborate in real-time, conduct online meetings, manage workflows, and streamline decision-making.
The solution is often used by commercial, financial, nonprofit, healthcare, and government organizations. They employ it for collaborative decision-making, meeting management, board evaluations, reporting, analytics, and data management.
How does board meeting software streamline decision-making?
The best way to assess the value of solutions is to look at them through the lens of the problems themselves. So, we have prepared a list of challenges that directors often face throughout decision-making and how the platform helps to handle them.
Challenge 1: Access to relevant documentation
The sheer volume and variety of data sources make it difficult for boards to identify and access the most relevant information. Furthermore, it can be dispersed across different departments and systems within an organization, leading to data silos. Also, poor data consistency can result in suboptimal decisions.
👁️🗨️Although 81% of respondents agree that data should be central to decision-making, only 31% of companies have made significant changes to their operations to support this.
What you can do using board portal software:
- Store all relevant documents in one safe location with easy but secure access
- Organize files and folders in a neat document tree with a few clicks
- Identify data inconsistencies and errors before they impact your decisions
Board of directors software: Document storage
Challenge 2: Data and workflow security
Cybersecurity threats can impede, disrupt, or even halt decision-making. Therefore, teams must know how to manage risks and protect their resources and processes. Besides, directors are responsible for ensuring their organization complies with data protection and privacy laws. So, they should make choices that align with the law.
👁️🗨️The average cost of a global data breach last year was 4.45 million dollars.
What you can do using board portal software:
- Communicate through encrypted channels, ensuring that discussions remain confidential
- Set granular user and file permissions so that only authorized parties access data
- Comply with data protection regulations (GDPR, SOC, HIPAA, etc.)
- Keep detailed audit logs to demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements
Board of directors software: Granular document permissions
Challenge 3: Collaboration
Directors with diverse backgrounds, expertise, and perspectives may struggle to navigate these differences and ensure all viewpoints are considered. Moreover, they usually operate within strict deadlines, necessitating efficient communication to cover all the items on the agenda and make informed decisions within the allocated time frame. Lastly, board members can be in different cities or countries, which makes remote collaboration even more challenging.
What you can do using board portal software:
- Cast a vote for decisions, including voting anonymously, to express your opinion independently
- Access the agenda in advance to prepare for discussions and manage your time effectively during meetings
- Conduct online meetings for parties from anywhere in the world to ensure that all directors can contribute to decision-making
- Assign tasks and monitor their completion to delegate responsibilities, track progress, and follow up on action items
- Ask and answer in an organized manner using an easy-to-navigate Q&A module
Board of directors software: Q&A module
Challenge 4: Decision visibility
Your decisions should be transparent, documented, and accountable to stakeholders. It helps to understand where to go next, builds trust, and facilitates accountability. Otherwise, teams can lose clarity and a sense of order, which are essential for success.
What you can do using board portal software:
- Generate reports within a board portal platform to summarize decision-making activities, outcomes, and discussions
- Track the activity and engagement of each participant, identifying the most active ones
- Identify trends, patterns, and outliers in your data using bar or pie charts, line graphs, and heat maps
Board of directors software: Engagement tracker
Board portal solutions offer more capabilities and benefits than mentioned. Therefore, we recommend researching the best providers to see what other benefits you can get.
Wrapping it all up
When making decisions, you may encounter expected and unexpected obstacles along the way. Fortunately, the board management software gives you everything to handle these complexities, as it is specifically designed for directors and empowers them to make the best choices for success.
Taylor is a freelance SEO copywriter and blogger. His areas of expertise include technology, pop culture, and marketing.
