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Digitizing and Strengthening Board Governance with Diligent
Digitizing and Strengthening Board Governance with Diligent
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Diligent's Boards platform, accessed from an iPad.
Board governance is a challenge for organizations large and small, including irrigation districts and other organizations in the water industry. Organizing board meetings, preparing materials, keeping participants updated, and carrying out votes can amount to a formidable task—and can create plenty of paperwork. Diligent is one company working to make that task easier, more efficient, and more secure. Its Boards portal allows organizations large and small to prepare and distribute materials to their boards of directors, update those materials on a real-time basis, and carry out meetings with increased efficiency.
In this interview, Trevor Vale, director of global sales at Diligent, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Editor-In- Chief Kris Polly about what Diligent is bringing to conference and boardroom tables and how it can help irrigation districts across the country.
Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background and how long you’ve been with the company.
Trevor Vale: I have been with Diligent since July 2016, and I currently head up the global sales group. I have 25 years of sales experience within the financial services vertical, and spent most of my career selling either at large multinationals like Reuters, where I spent 10 years, or at smaller, midsized startups, companies like CarryQuote or Xignite. Prior to starting at Diligent, I managed a sales team at the Intercontinental Exchange, the owners of the New York Stock Exchange.
Kris Polly: Where are you from originally?
Trevor Vale: I was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, and moved to New York City in 2000, where I’ve been ever since. I went to the University of Waterloo, where I got an honors degree in political science.
Kris Polly: Tell us tell about Diligent and its history.
Trevor Vale: Diligent was founded in the early days of 2000 and was formally created in 2001. At the time, it was focused on building secure intranet web portals, which were all the rage back then, and meeting the market demand for web development and creation. It was through that business model that Diligent came to work with the large asset-management firm SunAmerica and took its first steps into the governance space. Diligent was tasked with creating a secure intranet portal for use by SunAmerica’s board of directors. The company asked us to reduce the amount of paper they had to produce for their quarterly board meetings. Diligent’s solution was built around digitizing that paperwork and presenting it through a secure intranet portal environment. We needed something robust enough to meet SunAmerica’s complex regulatory constraints—as an asset manager, SunAmerica had to comply with a ton of restrictions and regulations governing how board materials were distributed, maintained, or destroyed. Creating a product that could meet those strict requirements did take quite a bit of investment, which SunAmerica helped provide.
That relationship led us to more clients, and from that point, Diligent started to focus on the governance space. That is when the concept of the board portal slowly started to emerge. In 2010, Apple released its first iPad, and shortly thereafter Diligent developed its first app. This blew the doors wide open—it was a game changer. We could deploy our intranet concepts to the mobile platform. Now directors didn’t have to sit around a desktop in the middle of the room or be dependent on their laptops. The iPad allowed directors easy access to board books and other content through the secure app.
At that point, Diligent started to double down on support and customer success. Early on, the founders of the company saw the need to create a robust customersupport infrastructure in order to ensure that boards of directors were comfortable with the new technology. We made it a priority to conduct one-on-one training sessions with directors and administrators. Our continued commitment to customer service remains one of the key things that sets us apart from others in the marketplace.
In 2015, Brian Stafford joined Diligent as chief executive officer, bringing a new perspective to how the company functioned and where it invested its money. This led to the acquisition of Diligent by Insight Venture Partners, a New York–based private equity firm.
Kris Polly: Would you walk our readers through Diligent’s governance services for boards of directors?
Trevor Vale: Diligent Boards is the core product that we provide to corporate directors and senior leaders. Today, the users of the Boards platform include about 450,000 board members and senior leaders of more than 14,000 organizations. The platform is used in more than 90 countries around the world. Our standard agreement is a 12-month subscription, so our clients have the option to leave us every year, but we have a 98 percent clientretention rate.
How is our Boards platform used to improve the governance of our clients’ organizations? On the simplest level, we’re digitizing the director experience and removing paper from the equation. If you look at the board book–creation timeline, preparation for those quarterly meetings goes on throughout the year. It usually starts when the corporate secretary’s office or the general counsel starts to assemble the materials needed for the board books that the directors will use during those meetings. Our platform helps general counsels and administrators assemble those board books in an efficient, quick manner. Our platform also includes features like board book archives, a resource center with searchable reference materials, agenda builders, and digital voting tools. Time and time again, administrators tell us that our platform saves them a lot of time. They don’t have to collate paper copies anymore or send out constant revisions to fix minor mistakes. When they revise materials on our platform, those revisions are automatically made to everyone’s copy of the board book, and notifications of those revisions can be sent to directors automatically.
From the directors’ point of view, they can now come to board meetings with nothing more than a mobile device with our app installed. Their materials are provided through the app, which is encrypted and secure. The data is accessed in a way that prevents any access by third parties—including any attempted cyberattacks. At the meeting, board members can scroll through and search within their digital board books, highlight things and make annotations, and vote, all from their preferred mobile device. Our design ensures that the experience is fairly similar to the experience of using a paper book. The material is laid out on pages you can flip, just like in a paper board book.
Kris Polly: Would you tell us about the experience of the general managers who use your platform?
Trevor Vale: We look at governance in a broader way than many of our competitors. We refer to it as the Governance Cloud. Our products go beyond the meetings themselves. Of course, facilitating those quarterly board meetings in an efficient and secure manner is critical, but we are also thinking about the other components of the directors’ life cycle that we can start to participate in, and how we can help general managers in their governance work. How can we help them more easily consume data on a day-to-day basis? How can we help them stay informed about matters relating their boards and help them communicate with one another without the risk of being hacked?
I talked about how we make it easier to create the board books. We also have an agenda-builder feature that allows for a very succinct agenda to be presented to board members well before the actual board meeting. That incudes the locations of events like the dinner and the board meeting, but it can also get down into the weeds of the items to be discussed. The communication of that agenda has gotten a lot simpler, and it can be updated in real time, whether that means changing the location of the dinner or reprioritizing the agenda.
As the meeting is conducted, the Diligent platform allows board members to quickly find pages without having to flip through a long book. There is also a keyword search.
Kris Polly: If a board member brings up an issue that had been discussed 1 or 2 years prior, can that information be accessed?
Trevor Vale: We give our organizations the ability to archive board books as often and for as long as they choose. The kind of history they want to retain is up to them. Certain organizations are required to archive those materials forever or to dispose of board books immediately. We enable organizations to comply with whatever requirements and regulations apply to them. To answer your question, most of our clients do have an archive that allows board members to find past meeting information quickly. So if you’re a director who has been sitting on a board for 5 years, you may have access to all of the board books that you used over that time span, and perhaps beyond that. If an organization needs to make 10 years of board books available, it can do that. If regulations and rules permit, directors can also archive their notes. They could go back three meetings and pull up notes that they made then. It is up to the organization to determine the appropriate retention policy.
Kris Polly: How can the platform be used to send messages?
Trevor Vale: There is a feature in Diligent Boards that allows a director to add a virtual annotation—it looks just like a sticky note on a piece of paper—to a page of board materials. If the organization has this feature enabled, that annotation could actually be sent to a number of people. That is one method of communication. It is encrypted and can be disposed of as soon as the meeting adjourns.
The platform can also send out updates. All directors could be sent a notification that something has changed in the board book. Diligent also provides a secure, encrypted communication tool called Messenger that allows boards to move away from using unsecured email.
Kris Polly: Would you give our readers an idea of how the subscription is priced?
Trevor Vale: Generally, our pricing is based around the number of directors or users—we define users as directors or administrators—and the number of committees. Often our clients will use the platform not just for their main board, but for the audit committee or the subcommittees that may exist under that board hierarchy. Clients have the option to add Governance Cloud modules to the Boards platform, including Diligent Messenger, questionnaires, evaluations, and minutes. For our 24/7/365 customer service, there is no charge at all—that comes with every subscription, whether your organization has a small user community of 8 or a user base of 200. We will also train directors and staff on site with no limitation. It’s not uncommon for us to appear at the first two board meetings during which our clients are using the Boards platform and wait in the lobby, so that if there are any questions, we can answer them on site. Sometimes we even go to directors’ homes or offices to train them on the platform.
Kris Polly: Would you give our readers an idea of how much the service might cost for them?
Trevor Vale: Well, I will tell you that the 14,000 organizations that use Diligent today, from the smallest nonprofits and private companies to the largest multinational corporations and investment banks, are all starting to consider good governance as an important component of what they do. Based on the usage model, it seems to work for organizations of all sizes.
Kris Polly: What is your message for irrigation district boards of directors and managers?
Trevor Vale: We are the leaders in defining a brand-new category of modern governance. We believe the enterprise risk and governance base is largely being underserved. Our Boards platform has a long history and is highly secure. We’ve got a really good ownership structure that routes a lots of money back to R&D, ensuring that we’re constantly keeping our product up to date. Our laser focus is on digitizing, securing, and enabling effective governance, not just for directors themselves but for the entire community around them. We know the governance space in a way that, frankly, others in the market just don’t. We’ve created things like the Diligent Institute to start providing research and thought leadership on global governance practices, based on all the interactions we have in a given year with our 450,000-strong user community. In talking to them, we learn a lot about governance and what is on their minds. We run events each year in which we bring directors together just to get a sense of what’s on their minds and how we can solve the problems our clients have. Security, customer service, and reliability are all part and parcel of what we do.
Trevor Vale is the global sales director at Diligent. He can be reached at tvale@diligent.com.