The Mobile Boardroom: No More Bulky Board Packs

Tired of handling bulky board packs for board meetings? Is may be time to re-evaluate your current boardroom practices.

With tablets and smartphones getting more powerful with each release, complemented by wave after wave of apps for every business purpose, corporate enterprises are the first to equip their top brass with the latest in mobile technologies.

True mobile technologies take out the limiting factor of distance and time, giving corporate leaders enhanced capacity for intelligent decision-making, as well as more efficient steering and control of strategies and agenda—and this is exemplified more than ever in a boardroom setting. It’s definitely time for paperless board meetings to gradually replace the unnecessary use of bulky board packs.

The days of delays or unnecessary costs due to manual searching for documents, and then collating, reproducing and distributing them, are over. Everything your directors and administrators will need in a board meeting can be replaced with a board meeting software like Convene—an enterprise-grade mobile meeting, information sharing and real-time collaboration application tool.

Streamlining the Board Meeting Process

A board meeting software handles the entire board meeting workflow—from scheduling the meeting, inviting attendees, preparing documents and presenting them, recording important points, decisions and actions, and then archiving all materials, notes and minutes.

Last-minutes changes (which always happens) to a meeting’s details like the date and time, agenda, attendee list and meeting files, are automatically reflected in the Meeting Schedule, so attendees are always updated. This in contrast when updating bulky board packs which can be a big inconvenience in time and printing costs.

Easily Produce and Update Bulky Board Packs

Board secretaries can prepare meeting materials while on the go: as long as they are within WiFi coverage, documents can be uploaded to the board meeting software in an instant. Having an integrated powerful cloud-based document and meeting management portal is beneficial to easily access documents on the cloud especially when using iPads, tablets or internet browsers. This is a lot more convenient than distributing, storing, and holding big board packets comprised of hundreds of pages.

Enhance Communication with Presentation Tools

Board meeting software also allows for features such as page synchronization and a built-in laser pointer. The presenter during the meeting can smoothly guide a presentation,  of which important points and meeting pace can be easily followed by attendees. Additional native support for VGA projectors enables sharing of content to a large audience in a conference. This is inherently better than going back and forth through hundreds of pages to follow the presenter’s topic.

Find the Correct Information Quickly

Having a software with a user interface that is so intuitive that even non-tech savvy executives will have no trouble navigating through pages of meeting materials would be a huge benefits in the boardroom. Getting to a page just by tapping page thumbnails or using a flick gesture is a lot faster than flipping through pages to find the data being looked for in board packets. A search function or word finder also will make the process of finding the needed information much easier.

Add Annotations to Improve Accountability

With just a tap, attendees can also use annotation tools to highlight lines of text or areas on a page. Having something like a digital notes tool is useful not only in jotting down points on a page, but can also be used to record major decisions made in a meeting and then save them as action items or things to follow up in a list. These would help keep executives on track with discussed agenda, milestones or deadlines.

If notes are too small to list all points in a discussion, executives can even open a whiteboard, where ideas, designs, processes, or even freehand text, can be illustrated and erased quickly. This would allow executives to share ideas or quickly graph ideas. On the other hand, if done on board papers, this can be very inconveniencing for the directors when trying to portray or conceptualize ideas.

Archive Records for Corporate Governance

After the meeting, a software would allow annotated PDFs of the meeting documents be forwarded to participants for record keeping and future reference. This is faster than having to manually compile board papers and documents used in the meeting and distributing them physically through carrier. The meeting documents themselves can be easily accessible and stored within the storage system of the software rather than storing bulky board packs in a drawer, never to be used again.

Enhance Board Packet Security

Aside from distributing materials and information to attendees, another important concern is not delivering them into the wrong hands. There is a big risk when distributing bulky board packs as these may be given to the wrong people.

A digital tool like a board meeting software would answer this with security features such as 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption for data and document storage. These can even be deployed as an on-premise solution to an organization’s own server infrastructure for greater control over sensitive data.

With executives going places in a hurry, there’s the risk of losing or misplacing the board packets, which contains confidential or critical data. It is then beneficial to have a software that has an auto-purge feature that can remotely wipe out data and away from malicious hands.

Replace Bulky Board Packs

Bulky board packs are an annoying inconvenience for board members and administrators. It may be time to start considering a mobile boardroom and replace the use of hundreds of papers for board meetings.

Having a board software can help digitally transform and make the boardroom more mobile and flexible