When board portals debuted a decade or more ago, the digitization of bulky board books was groundbreaking. Today, we are in an era where cross-device document sharing and digital collaboration tools are ubiquitous — except, it seems, in our corporate boardrooms.
Board portals have done little to evolve beyond document storage, and where they are making updates, those changes are more patchwork and duct tape than transformation. More than a decade after bringing board work into the digital age, the available software is still lagging behind tools that the employees and leaders of the companies these boards advise take for granted in other aspects of their day to day work.
They fall short in collaboration options, little or no guidance around common board work challenges, and thin options for accountability and measurement of board work overall. In short, board portals offer digital documents, but do little to help board directors do the actual board work, let alone get better at it or understand how effective what they are doing is in the big picture. To become a better board director, you need better software.
The World’s First Integrated Board Intelligence & Management Platform
This is why we call Cloud Concinnity® the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform. It is a platform, not a portal, offering a toolkit for board directors to perform and measure their work in new ways. We built a platform for board directors to stand on so they can focus on doing great work, not playing administrative catch up.
1. ACCESS gets better with COMMUNICATION
We built our software around integrated communication. It’s not an add-on, it’s at the heart of the tool, tying activities to documents to calendars to messaging to meetings. Instead of scrambling the week before a meeting to do research, submit documents, and get questions answered, you’ll be part of an integrated board team. Occasional and automatically timed alerts will keep you on schedule (instead of scrambling at the last minute) and secure remote work options mean everyone you need to talk to is reachable inside the network. Bryan Stolle has an excellent Forbes article about what makes a great board member where he points to traits like judgment, wisdom, ad courage. Becoming a better board director is about putting these kinds of traits to use, not getting mired in administrative details.
2. PROCESS gets better with BEST PRACTICES
Running through the veins of our software is the Concinnity Framework, comprised of 10 Imperatives that drive High Performance for boards. This framework picks up where board portals leave off — we advise your members on how to use the information and network at their disposal to do better work. In addition to our framework, we include an ever-growing library of best practices around common board challenges like financial planning, human resources, and compliance standards. On top of that, we offer automated workflows that tie together sequential tasks, cutting down the administrative burden so more time and energy goes to strategy. We do it so that your energy goes to applying the best approaches to your specific situation rather than wondering if there is a better way to do things. Becoming a better board director is about refining your style, not starting from scratch every time.
3. OUTCOMES get better with MEASUREMENT
Whether it’s McKinsey or the Harvard Business Review, the experts know that outcomes get better when they are measured over time. And we all know it too. The problem isn’t getting on board with measurement, the problem has always been doing it in way that is reasonable rather than disruptive. That’s why we’ve designed features into our software that allow directors to more easily know important metrics and oversee achievements at a glance. We created a balanced board scorecard so that board directors can give feedback inside the same tool they do their work in, and we created measurement criteria that offer non-intrusive accountability. Becoming a better board director shouldn’t be a whole separate job, it should just be an integrated part of doing your work.
To become a better board director, you need better software, and we’ve made it our mission to give you just that.
Interested in how Cloud Concinnity can make a difference for your board? Get in touch.
The Concinnity Company™ provides boards and c-suites with elegant technology and best practices. Cloud Concinnity® is the world’s first integrated board intelligence and management platform.
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