Digital tools have proven their worth to boards during the pandemic and, despite calls for a return to the office, many of the practices put in place to ensure business survival will remain.
That’s the conclusion of a white paper, Digital boards: How technology adoption is driving culture change and resilience produced by Board Agenda and Diligent, the boardroom digital tools provider, after examining the lessons and experience of the Covid-19 crisis.
In short, remote working enabled staff to work from home while the transfer of business operations to digital platforms at an accelerated pace enabled business continuity. Hybrid working will become a permanent feature of contemporary business as companies adopt and consolidate lessons absorbed during the impact of Covid-19.
But digital tools will go further, according to experts. Data and technology will enable boards to view information more immediately and, as a result, improve decision-making. This includes not only business operations but also on the key issues of environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns amplified throughout the crisis.
Dottie Schindlinger, author of Governance in the digital age and executive director of the Diligent Institute, says the future challenge will be learning how to harness and analyse the vast quantities of data that are now being created and collected inside organisations throughout their business operations.
“The future is going to be more of a coalescence of different kinds of tools coming together and providing a very easy interface for directors to interact with,” says Schindlinger. “I can really envision in the very near future, directors having much more immediate access to data that showing how the business is really performing, what the main areas of risk are, and then using intelligence to get a sense of potential areas of opportunity.”