Building a business case for a board portal

By now, you’ve realised that boardroom inefficiencies present costs and risks. You might have seen that 56% of boards now use a secure portal to distribute board materials, up from 40% in 2020. You’ve decided that your organisation would benefit from a portal. But this is the easy part.

The hard part is persuading finance, IT and legal stakeholders – normally people who don’t sit in board meetings – that a change will be beneficial. These are the people who’ll have to put in the legwork to onboard new tech and who’ll have insightful concerns that need to be assuaged.

So how should you go about presenting your case? The temptation might be to upsell the benefits and downplay the challenges. We’re here to tell you this is the wrong approach. The most persuasive cases are those that acknowledge the costs, risks and implementation challenges and demonstrate that the change will be worth it anyway.

Key takeaways

Your business case will need to pass muster with the CFO, General Counsel, CTO and their executive teams. For each of these, a board portal business case will:

• Take a good look at the current process and quantify its time spent, costs and risks
• Qualitatively and quantitatively compare doing nothing with your proposition
• Transparently show the cost of implementation or migration and training
• Project ROI

Honestly address potential obstacles and present mitigation  

What does each stakeholder need to see?

It would be great if everyone was always singing from the same hymn sheet, had the same information to hand and could be persuaded by the same data. Unfortunately, that’s seldom the case. Here’s how to present your case to each party.

What does finance need to know?

Unsurprisingly, finance are going to want robust numbers. Some costs are harder to quantify than others – something we’ll get into in more detail a little later on – so this is your opportunity to provide as much detail as possible, in particular comparing the costs of current process to those of implementing a board portal or migrating to a superior product.

There’s opportunity to make a strong case here. Assuming you’ve spoken to your intended supplier already, you know the total cost of your proposed plan. The harder number is the cost of doing nothing, and it’s worth the effort of working it out. Price the admin hours, the IT support time, the print and courier spend, and your best estimate of the exposure if papers currently move by email.

What does IT need to know?

IT will have a checklist of criteria that any new software will need to meet as well as plans for how to bring new tools up to code. These may be beyond your area of expertise, like SSO, identity management, permissions, data residency, retention and auditability, the burden of support and the challenge of implementation. These are topics your proposed supplier should be only too happy to discuss, equipping you with the detail you need to make a strong case. More so than finance, IT will have sympathy with arguments that remove the need to continually patch systems and processes that aren’t fit for purpose.

What does legal need to know?

This is one of the topics that can get stakeholders genuinely excited. No ad hoc process is going to have the same level of sophistication and legal oversight as a dedicated platform. Legal concerns will centre around auditability, document and data retention, records of meetings and minutes. Legal can be reassured there’s an evidential history to every important conversation, decision and document, complete with who had access to what and when. Familiarise yourself with the current pain points of their work concerning board packs – do they struggle to locate the correct versions of papers? Have there been legal difficulties with mis-sent documents or people working from two different versions of the same pack? It may be possible to put a cost against this.

What does the board need to know?

At the end of the day, this is the audience who stand to benefit most from a board portal. You’re making your case because you believe that it will improve efficiency and decision-making. That’s important, but equally the board will need to know qualitatively how their experience will change. Acknowledge that there may be resistance; even positive change is all but certain to put some backs up if it means a period of inefficiency or the fuss of learning new software.  

The big question: the true cost of your current process

The component of your case that will have the biggest impact won’t be waxing lyrical about the benefits of a board portal. It will be an honest and detailed examination of your current processes. If a finance leader, IT stakeholder or executive sponsor is given a zoomed-out view and thinks ‘It’s clear that this could be done better,’ you’re halfway there.

Detail will not only show where the pitfalls lie but highlight inefficiencies to people who may not have been aware that they were there in the first place. This is particularly true for the stakeholders discussed already: those who don’t sit in on board meetings and have little frame of reference for why improvements are needed.

Topics to consider run the gamut of inefficient uses of time and resources:

• How long does it take to create a comprehensive board pack? Who’s doing this work and what is it taking them away from? And how thoroughly scrutinised is the result? (In other words, was it worth all that time and energy?)
• Whose input is needed to generate the material a board needs to know? How easy is it to get what’s needed from them, and how much chasing is involved?
• How much time does it take each board member to read and digest the pack? Board packs average 220 pages, the length of a short novel, and distilling the key information from that is hard work, sometimes before an agenda even exists, is challenging
• Versioning a board pack is tricky if the inflow of relevant information comes in fits and starts, and the more versions there are, the greater the risk of arriving to a board meeting with outdated information. Not to mention wasted time and money when it comes to proofreading and printing
• The costs of printing and couriering packs can be considerable
• And if your process is paperless (or partially so), what IT support is incurred and can you put a cost against that?

The work around the pack is growing too. Board Intelligence and the Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland found that large organisations now spend £5.9m a year on board reporting, up 163% since 2019. Directors’ workloads have risen 20% in ten years, according to the National Association of Corporate Directors. Less time, more labour-intensive work. If the governance team is under-resourced, the squeeze is sharper still.

These are trends, not static figures; left as they are, they will only move in one direction. It doesn’t require much imagination to project a future where board reporting is more onerous than it is useful. Every hour spent chasing contributors, versioning and sourcing external data is an hour not spent supporting the board strategically.

Estimating the true cost of email-based board papers

We alluded to this before, and on the surface the back and forth of large emails doesn’t seem a particularly important matter. However, errors in this area can be hugely consequential and a system based on email distribution lists relies to a large extent on humans, who are – in case it needs mentioning – notoriously fallible.

In the first instance, a business has very little control over whom an email is forwarded to once it arrives at its destination. It’s an unsavoury thought but it cannot be dismissed as a risk. A small typo in manually inputting emails can lead to the wrong person receiving highly sensitive information. Reliance on distribution lists that are seldom updated can lead to people no longer in the business, such as former directors, receiving emails erroneously. Very few people only have their emails on a single device, meaning sensitive information can be retained on many more devices than recipients.

The list of risks from an email-based distribution process is long. Losing an audit trail can have serious consequences. As mentioned, confusion as to which version is the most current breeds the potential for error, disagreement and decisions based on inadequate information. It can be difficult or even impossible to revoke access to documents if they’ve slipped the net and are circulating non-business accounts. Regulatory scrutiny becomes much more challenging. Moreover, it isn’t just board packs that are being sent. Board evaluation documents, executive remuneration decisions or discussions and other highly sensitive information can easily end up in the wrong hands – even if those hands are internal – when systems are fundamentally insecure.

One of the most salient risks is auditability. We’ve all been CCed into one of those never-ending email chains with participants coming and going, replying privately, starting their own threads and so on. While it’s not impossible to audit this sort of thing, it’s a headache and deeply inefficient. Ultimately, it’s a risk.

In brief, these costs aren’t easily quantified or put into a neat graph, but they are important and constitute an unnecessary risk.

Make sure the benefits respond to real-world concerns

Naturally, you won’t have data on how much time a board portal has saved your business until you’ve been using one for a few cycles. There’s no shortage of evidence of the time and effort saved. Nationwide is saving 45% of the time it spent preparing for board meetings since switching to Board Intelligence. Adam Jeffries, Group CIO at JTC, reports a 20–25% time saving in creating board packs. But these will remain abstract if they’re not tied to the experiences of people in your organisation.

Drilling down into both the costs of your current processes and the challenges of implementing a new portal allows you to examine the benefits persuasively and with clarity. You wouldn’t be presenting this case at all if you didn’t already know that it will ultimately be worth it. 

Compare every option – including doing nothing

All of these considerations can lead to a table of options that summarise possible courses of action, like this one:

Include all the costs, including those most business cases would normally ignore

As we’ve covered, it’s going to lend credibility to a business case if you’ve included everything, including the anticipation of likely pushback. Let’s imagine you’re making the case for onboarding a board portal for the first time (it will be a different arithmetic if you’re proposing a migration from one to another). You might want to work through:

• Licensing costs
• Implementation costs
• Data migration and permissions
• Historic data retrieval and integration
• Training
• Ongoing supplier support
• Temporary productivity dip during teething period
• Risk of parallel running
• Potential contract exit costs (more relevant to switching suppliers)

Those are the temporal and financial costs you’re almost certain to encounter. Then add to that:

• Director and executive resistance
• Negative attitudes to wholesale change
• Differential speeds of assimilation on an individual basis
• Preferences for paper report reading

Once you’ve tallied all the costs, you’re ready to enumerate the benefits. Not just the benefits of having a portal, but those specific to the product you’re proposing.

When evaluating suppliers, governance professionals should consider not only security and functionality but also how quickly directors and executives can adopt the platform. This anticipates issues of resistance and uncertainty. Return is tied to how quickly directors and executives get comfortable, because a long settling-in period eats the gains you’re promising. If you can show your proposed supplier saves time even during adoption, that’s one of the strongest lines in the case.

Board Intelligence’s Portal is board management software built to run every board meeting from one secure hub. Governance teams manage materials, logistics and next steps across all forums. Directors read packs on any device, annotate papers, share questions ahead of meetings and vote on decisions, with annotations carrying across revisions.

Make the benefits strong but realistic

Finance teams are more likely to challenge assumptions than conclusions. Showing the calculation is more persuasive than claiming a large return; if someone has made it to executive or boardroom status, they’re not going to be swayed by an advert as much as they are a projection they can work through for themselves.

We’ve covered the benefits in some detail here, but be sure to summarise the headline takeaways:

• Pack production time is shortened
• Yet the packs’ quality is improved
• Meetings are more productive
• Decision-making is improved and more focused
• Security risks are reduced
• Compliance exposure is better managed
• Admin hours are saved
• Reading and digesting hours are saved
• Support requirement reduced
• Printing and courier spend reduced

A word on first-time implementation vs switching

There are clearly different questions to be asked when considering onboarding a portal for the first time or switching from an old to new model. In the second case, your CFO will ask what’s wrong with the system you already pay for. It’s a fair question, and the case has to answer it before it answers anything else.

You will, of course, be prepared for this. This is where considerations such as using the end of a contract to time a migration, raising the bar for efficiency and productivity, and improving processes that have identifiable pain points can be discussed. A switch has to clear a higher bar than a first purchase. A first purchase replaces a process nobody is defending. A switch asks the organisation to revisit a decision it already made, so the question stops being whether a portal is worth it and becomes what is wrong with the one you have. Answer that head on. Name the specific gaps, show what they cost you each cycle, and time the proposal to the end of your current contract so the comparison is about the next term rather than the last one. Moreover, technological advances are not distributed evenly among board portal providers. AI, for example, is rapidly changing the nature of most work. Selecting a product that allows you to be ahead of the curve and projecting years into the future, rather than retaining a product that will mean you’re constantly playing catch-up, is a persuasive argument for any forward-thinking business.

What gets a business case approved

Making all costs and benefits visible and considered provides the strongest business case for board portal adoption or migration. While in some business cases it’s common to minimise the cost or complexity of change, finance, IT and legal stakeholders expect implementation effort, migration challenges and adoption risk. What your business case will demonstrate is that these are significantly less burdensome than not making the change. If the return remains compelling even as the realities are acknowledged, approval becomes much easier.

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