One of the projects I’m working on at my job is implementing an electronic document and collaboration solution for my company’s Board of Directors. It has been a neat journey into a niche market, and little has been written about the technology from an IT perspective.
If your company is considering an implementation of a Board of Directors portal, I encourage your IT team’s close involvement in the project in partnership with your Corporate Secretary. This is one of the few opportunities that your IT department can showcase itself to the team that writes the checks for your technology projects. In our case, our Corporate Secretary is very involved in the leadership of the project, and IT is leading the business analysis and technology efforts.
If you are not familiar with board of director portals, some basic features offered by companies in the market include:
- Document and Agenda compilation – an administrator uploads Microsoft Office, PDF documents, and sometimes multimedia files, where it is then compiled into a single electronic board book package. That electronic package then allows the creation of a board meeting agenda with hyperlinks to relevant portions of the electronic board book. Once the agenda is created, the package is included in a discrete, time-bound “meeting” object.
- Role-based Security – Not all documents in the meeting packet need to be accessed by board members. For example, board committees may want to grant access to their material only to committee members and not the larger board.
- Directory – This is more than just a simple contact list. Some board portal vendors are offering “Follow” functionality that publishes activity feeds of individual board member activity.
- Collaboration – Discussion threads, document comments, and other things typically included in team collaboration software.
- Voting and Approvals – polling, surveys, and recorded votes
- Mobile support – basic document reading, and sometimes collaboration features, are available on a tablet devices like the Apple iPad.
I don’t want to reveal too much about our direction, but here are some things you want to keep in mind for your Board Portal implementation
- Usability- Know your board. How are board meetings conducted today? How does the board member use technology in his or her work? At home? Does the board member own an iPad? Does a member of your board already use a board portal? If so, what features are used? How could the experience improve?You want the administrative and end user interfaces of your board portal to be both simple and compelling, yet not all vendors I surveyed meet that expectation. The Apple iPad has been a significant development in this market, as the experience of reading the board book has become enhanced over paper. Hyperlinks to notable pages in the board book can be placed in the agenda. The board book is searchable, and annotations can be made and shared with other board members.
- Security – As NASDAQ OMX learned the hard way, there exists an Advanced Persistent Threat of hackers targeting board portals seeking an insider trading advantage on public North American companies. Most vendors of board portal solutions offer their solutions almost exclusively as Software-as-a-Service. How sensitive is the information in your company’s board book? Are you comfortable hosting perhaps your firm’s most confidential information on another company’s assets, managed by another company’s employees? Can your board portal provider view your company’s board meeting material? Are you confident in the enforcement of the vendor’s data retention policies? In the world of corporate governance, the more information a board member leaves behind after viewing documents (think system logs, cache, etc), the more information is left for discovery. Do you know what is being logged?Most of the vendors in the board portal market are offering what amounts to a document repository, where board information is uploaded in, for example, a Microsoft Word document, transformed into a PDF, and downloaded again without additional security controls. While this may be nice from a portability standpoint, I view this as a significant deficiency in security and discoverability. Two solutions in the market, BoardVantage and Diligent Board Books, offer an online document viewing experience that does not rely on any downloading or desktop clients.
- Mobility – The duties of today’s board members extend beyond the quarterly meetings. Your board members are among your company’s best advocates. Not only do your board members want updates on a more frequent basis, but they want the information they need from anywhere. As mentioned earlier, the Apple iPad and other tablets are a significant development in this requirement. An app that securely stores board documents for viewing at any time, even offline, has been an important requirement for us.
Here’s a list of products our team has surveyed, along with some comments of mine, that you may want to check out:
BoardVantage – Offers a feature-rich platform for executive document publishing and collaboration, secures documents with client-less viewers, and features a very nice iPad app. Offered in both Software-as-a-Service and On Premise deployment.
BoardEffect – Positioned for non-profit organizations. Offers a Sharepoint-like experience and an iPad app for document reading.
Diligent Boardbooks – primary competitor to BoardVantage. Offers an iPad app for document viewing and annotations.
IntraLinks – while not a Board of Directors portal, IntraLinks is a hosted team collaboration platform for secure collaboration with external partners. Think document sharing for mergers and acquisitions.
NASDAQ OMX Directors Desk – Suffered blows after a well publicized breach of their system’s security. The portal is accessible to tablets via online browsers, so no offline document viewing support, and the document reading experience leaves much to be desired.
Thomson-Reuters BoardLink – Comprehensive content management features. Requires an RSA SecurID token, which is inconvenient and frustrating to a number of executives I have worked with. Offers an iPad app.
Financial Services DirectorAccess – Competitive feature offering, offers on-premise implementation in addition to their Software-as-a-Service offerings. Mid-market customers. iPad app only offers basic document viewing functionality.
EnvisionIT – offers SharePoint customization for Board of Directors, and a SharePoint plugin that makes authenticating external users much easier.
