Board meetings are where the top heads of organizations meet to deliberate and make decisions on important matters affecting both the present and the future of the organization. They are also convened to handle very important emergencies that may arise during the running of the business. As one would imagine, setting up board meetings can become very monotonous and time consuming, regardless of the time available to plan. For example in the case of administrative tasks, invites need to be sent, minutes of the previous meeting need to be sent, RSVP’s need to be received and supporting documents for the meeting need to be sent, etc. It is also very time consuming, and a lot of paper and other resources tend to be wasted in sending the physical documents to each board member, while it would be easier if everything were sent on soft copy.
All the undertakings of setting up a board meeting have been automated through a solution called Electronic Board Management Solution, or E-Board for short. This solution has taken into consideration all the processes and activities involved in board management. Before describing the tasks that can be undertaken by the E-Board it is important to first emphasize the importance of security of your board management solution. To ensure peace of mind in regards to the security of sensitive documents as well as inability to alter documents within the solution there needs to be extensive and elaborate security measures put in place. These include cyber security software as well as access control capabilities within the solution, just to name a few.
Some of the activities that can be greatly enhanced by E-Board solutions are listed below:
1. Security
E-Board software provides specific controls over who has access to what information. Administrators can easily add or remove members, edit profiles, and assist with forgotten passwords. Members can be assigned to one or more committees. Committee information is private and can only be viewed by the committee’s members.
2. Easier execution of Board Administration Tasks
With board management software, meetings preparation time is reduced from hours to minutes. Instead of printing, assembling, and shipping paper copies of materials, all documents are instead uploaded to the cloud. Files are automatically converted to PDF as they are uploaded.
Board software also allows administrators to organize committees, set meetings, request votes, create surveys and share files. Meeting agendas can be created once, and saved as templates for future use.
3. Reduced Board Administration costs
As we mentioned earlier, boards typically spend valuable time and money on printing, assembling, and shipping board packets before meetings. With E-Board software, information is shared instantly and securely with members, significantly reducing costs and speeding up the distribution process.
Organizations using cloud E-Board software experience a substantial return on investment from materials and labor savings alone.
4. Easy access to Board Documents
Traditional boards were typically limited to the printed information that was provided for specific meetings. The transition to cloud E-Board software allows board members to have secure, remote access to important documents, such as:
- Past meeting minutes
- Strategic plans
- Policy manuals
- Audit reports
- Etc
5. Board Member collaboration
Member collaboration is no longer confined to the boardroom. Votes, survey tools, annotations and discussion boards allow committee members to provide feedback as their schedule permits, while keeping to firm deadlines.
Coseke Kenya Limited is the main distributor of E-Board solutions, through our partnership with the world’s leading E-Board solutions provider, Passageways. For more on this solution kindly log on to www.passageways.com and watch the video.
