What is the importance of digitalising the board room?

Year is 2019, new horizons have opened up in conjunction with this digital era. For a board room to stay ahead of the competition, it first needs to be able to keep up.

Digital Competencies

Board work is comprised of numerous subjective decisions about threats, opportunities and risks. Having the final say in crucial and vital strategic discussions is a privilege, and responsibility, that lies with the board. Industry-specific expertise and foresight are two heavy-weighing factors when it comes to making these subjective decisions.

Mapping out the company’s strategic direction and keeping on top of company management are the two driving elements that make up the board room. It goes without saying that the strategic role of today’s boards has evolved over recent years. Digital competence is now key in contributing to any constructive dialogue with executives about innovation or new business models. How can the board ensure the advancement of their company if they don’t speak the language of digitalisation? Without being up to date on global- and industry trends and opportunities, or sufficient insight to understand the reasoning behind executive decisions and when to question them, the board fails to deliver.

Hence, how can directors be confident in taking advantage of opportunities offered by new technology and other digital solutions, if that digital competency isn’t present? In such a scenario, how can they add value to the decision making of the company? I’m not claiming that board directors need to have a fluent capacity of this tongue, but the company does need directors who are on top of digital trends and developments within relevant industries.

Nowadays, every future decision needs to be assessed from a digital standpoint – digitalising an already implemented strategy is not enough. 

Digital solutions

The board room of today is at risk to become detached from the the rest of the progressive corporate governance landscape. As we see modern technology rapidly transform this environment, our board rooms are left with but little change. Even with digital board portals being accessible, physical copies of documentation, dated tools for subjective analysis and heavy reliance on self-made questionnaires are just a few of the improvable aspects that are common in today’s board work.

For your board to establish a strong foundation, it’s counterproductive to depend on methodologies that don’t mirror the importance of your work. For example; as a banker, you wouldn’t use arithmetics to calculate the factors of a huge financial task (say, a multi-million dollar transfer) – you’d opt for the calculator. The benefit doesn’t outweigh the risk, don’t you agree? In this case, the calculator reflects the importance of the task, your arithmetic skills do not.

By entering a digital board room, you are welcomed with everything from cloud-based platforms to interactive- and strategic discussions – just to name a few. Opting for an integrated data- and analytics platform can provide a huge advantage in optimising the value of increased data volumes. Alas, leaders can stay on top of all facets of the business with ease.

By analysing this data, it allows them to explore relationships within and spot patterns and trends that leads to new opportunities, and ultimately forecast different scenarios that can be used to make strategic decisions.

Did you know that there is a way to adopt these progressional solutions, simultaneously?

Assessments

An assessment of your board, CEO or management team is a good place to start. Nothing provides more valuable insights into your board work than prompting executives and non-executives to evaluate your composition and strategic direction. The measurable facts that surface as a consequence can be used to, as aforementioned, discover your board’s level of digital competency, as well as forecast scenarios that you can base future strategic decisions upon.

Once you’ve decided to assess your board or management team, you need to adopt a methodology that mirrors the importance of this task. Say, a digital Smart Assessment-tool that can measure both quality and importance aspects of your board work, reveal priorities and deliver them in a visually apprehensible report. Does that even exist, you may ask?

Let me answer that question with; BoardClic.

In my previous post which was called “Why BoardClic?”, I deep dived into details how it can benefit your assessment strategy.

In short; BoardClic is digitalising the board-room by creating Smart Assessments of Board of Directors, CEOs and management teams – achieved through adopting a user-centric design approach and a data-driven process. Our proven concept and fact-based questions provide you with the tools and resources needed to identify, and subsequently act on, areas of improvement within top teams.

At BoardClic, we believe that we should measure what matters. By taking both quality and importance into account, we can uncover what priorities your board room really consist of. Subjective framing of questions, combined with anonymity, incites truthful responses and, subsequently, measurable facts. This information should be used to conduct your board work from in future decision making.