Empowering Your Higher Education Board To Unleash Efficiency Through Governance Technology
As a volunteer board member, you won’t have missed that the digital landscape is rapidly evolving and significantly impacting higher education. In this dynamic environment, it’s crucial for you and your fellow board members to position yourselves as tech-enabled decision-makers.
By embracing technology and its potential, you can more effectively navigate this changing landscape and make informed decisions that drive the success of your school.
Governance technology is an essential step toward digital transformation of your board and organization.
How Governance Technology Can Increase Efficiency for Your Higher Education Board
This article highlights some of the efficiency challenges that boards and organizations face when they don’t use governance technology, the costs of those challenges, and why implementing governance technology really does deliver a return on investment – not to mention a myriad of benefits for your board’s efficiency.
Most, if not all, governance professionals have spent time shuffling through board packet documents trying to find the right one to look at. Everyone wants more efficient board meetings, and busy board members not only want to maximize their time, but also want solutions that will improve their efficiency and save their organization money.
Some of the Efficiency Challenges Arising from Not Using Board Technology
If you are not using board technology, preparing for board meetings can be a time-consuming challenge that drains board efficiency.
Without boardroom technology, hard copies of meeting minutes need to be printed — and any edits or changes to those mean reprinting.
Even if you are using soft copies (e.g., in Word or PDF), any agenda changes or edits to board packets require those to be re-sent by email, with potentially multiple versions to keep track of. Emails are not an efficient or secure way of keeping track of many pieces of information for one board meeting, or for ensuring every board member gets adequate lead time.
The end result? Less time for board members to review – they don’t get as much time to review materials in the detail they need. In fact, they may even be reviewing out-of-date material if they don’t open the correct copy or version.
The Cost of Inefficiency – And the Gains That Come From Fixing It
Inefficient processes slow down workflows. Slow workflows impact cash flow. The slower the processes, the more money educational
Inefficiency also causes staff and the board to lose time. What many boards fail to account for is how much all that time adds up to. While one person losing a few minutes may not seem a lot, when that’s multiplied by many people, it gets harder to ignore.
Ultimately, such inefficiencies lead to staff having less time to address organizational goals. Improved efficiency not only results in reduced costs but also ends up having a positive effect on the mission.
The gains from improved management practices in the nonprofit sector could easily total $100 billion, observes Harvard Business Review. According to their joint study with McKinsey & Company, the nonprofit sector could free up that amount — maybe even more — by challenging the operating practices and notions of stewardship that currently govern the sector.
They suggest that board members should push their organizations to establish effectiveness and efficiency measures, and using governance technology is a key enabler for that.
Download the Board Effectiveness Checklist to identify areas of improvement and apply best practices for a more effective, productive and successful board.
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What Board Technology Can Deliver
Using governance technology can deliver a variety of efficiencies across the board’s and organization’s processes:
- Centralizing board materials in a single portal ensures access to the most current information
- Improving workflows to update and distribute sensitive documents
- Ensuring board members have ample time to review documents ahead of meetings
- Streamlining versions of documents, ensuring all parties access the most recent version of key documents
- Enabling board members to quickly and securely access documents they regularly need
- Delivering up-to-date information to board members to address time-sensitive organizational issues
- Dramatically reducing printing time and costs
There Is a Return on Investment if Your Board Uses Technology
More efficient processes help keep everything up to date. By using technology to deliver more data, not to mention higher quality data, board members have the right information at the right time to aid key decision-making.
That in turn mitigates risks, saves time and money, and improves the organization’s reputational status.
Additionally, board members and staff won’t spend as much time backtracking to retrieve needed data, freeing them up to focus on other, more strategic activities.
At the end of the day, using governance technology for your higher education board provides measurable efficiencies and benefits, delivering a return on investment which more than justifies its cost.
Have you considered purchasing a board management solution to manage and streamline board operations? With BoardEffect, you can automate board meeting processes, such as meeting preparation, taking minutes, sharing documents and collaborating.
