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Feature

Joe Ruck
CEO
BoardVantage

Top Ten Benefits of a Second-Generation Board Portal

Those benefits include improved collaboration, better decision support and timely information access, and responsiveness in urgent situations.

By Joe Ruck

For confidential communications at the board and executive level, companies have traditionally relied on a combination of email and paper-based processes. But the advent of geographically dispersed boards and mobile executives has triggered a demand for a more immediate, yet confidential, form of access.

To address this need, companies large and small are turning to second-generation board portals, which combine rich functionality with ease of use while preserving strict confidentiality and tight process control. Here are the benefits of these second-generation board portals:

1. Director Visibility
Communication to the board has traditionally been limited to quarterly in-person meetings, but that is becoming a thing of the past. Globalization and increased regulatory scrutiny has resulted in a quickening in the pace of board work and the need for greater responsiveness of individual directors. Portal technology is better equipped to deal with this dynamic than traditional paper processes because the portal provides ubiquitous access combined with the highest level of commercially available security.

2. Global Access
With a portal, directors have immediate access to any document, whether working in the office, at home, or on the road. All new material can be reviewed with a single click, and board agendas are designed for easy navigation. For traveling, directors can download materials in a secure offline repository and annotate pages in preparation for the board meeting.

3. Process Control
CEOs are quick to see the value of rapid and efficient communication, but may fear that introducing a portal means a loss of control over process. That fear is unfounded. The latest architecture allows for asserting control, by letting the CEO, or his proxy, engineer in business rules around information dissemination, so that only authorized users can view content.

4. Corporate Secretary Efficiency
Extensive planning, coordination and painstaking execution are required to keep the board communication process running smoothly. Workflows let corporate secretary staff populate the portal quickly and notify directors of the availability of new information. This translates into a significant efficiency boost in all aspects of board communication and a dramatic reduction in the amount of time consumed by document preparation. Tasks that used to take two days now take two hours.

5. Central Document Repository
Today many CS offices rely on enterprise document management systems to provide shared access to documents. These older systems suffer from poor user interfaces and were never designed to be accessed remotely. Modern Web-based portals combine a fully searchable central repository with an emphasis on ease of use that lets directors use full-text search for retrieval of archival documents.

6. Confidentiality and Security
Leading board portal companies have heavily invested in security, meeting the rigorous SAS70 Type II standard, which mandates an annual audit by independent third parties. This is a comprehensive review of product and process and is valued by IT departments for its thoroughness.

7. Risk Mitigation
A good board portal is designed with confidentiality as a primary objective, but there are other architectural and functional advantages that dramatically reduce risks. Document purging allows for enforcement of retention policies, and unlike standard office email systems, board portals permit a full and complete purge of individual email messages so that email messages that might become the basis for discovery in litigation can be purged as a standard part of a retention policy approved by the general counsel.

8. Reduced Printing Costs
A typical F1000 company spends about $40,000 per year in print costs for their board. Although print cost reductions are the most dramatic if a company goes entirely paperless, companies will still realize significant savings if they cut the number of board books distributed in half.

9. Privacy
All portals are designed to guard against confidentiality breaches, but 2nd generations systems also respect the privacy of individual directors. That means that usage patterns of directors are not tracked and vendor staff have no access to any customer content.

10. Focal Point for Executive Collaboration
Second Generation portals were originally developed to meet the confidential communication needs of directors in large corporations. Since those beginnings, functionality has evolved to incorporate the needs of dispersed leadership teams of officers, executives and outside advisers. Historically the medium has been paper, but it is rapidly falling out of favor because today’s volumes of information make it a bulky, slow and inflexible option. Email is sometimes substituted, but it is crippled by notoriously weak security. The benefits of 2nd generation portals include improved collaboration, better decision support, and timely information access, responsiveness in urgent situations, higher staff productivity, and protection against leaks of confidential information.

Joe Ruck is president and CEO of BoardVantage, a leading provider of second-generation board portals, with clients across multiple industries and in all sizes — including more than 20 Fortune 100 companies. He can be contacted at jruck@boardvantage.com.