The added challenge to capturing those communications is that their trajectory doesn’t follow a rigid, or even predictable, path. They are often evolving, adding participants or reshaping themselves around a changing objective or environment. This fluidity dictates a platform with the flexibility to accommodate those changes. At BoardVantage we use a model internally referred to as “Team, Task and Time” to assure that our NextGen platform maps to evolving requirements.

Teams are eclectic.

Leadership communication is not necessarily confined within hierarchical or structural boundaries. While members of leadership form the core of the team, outside auditors or advisors may participate to fulfill a process requirement. In other instances, individual contributors are added to provide a particular expertise. It’s this eclectic team composition that precludes uniform access and dictates a layered set of access privileges where permissions are granted in accordance with organizational position or other criteria.

Tasks vary broadly.

The fluidity of communication is also driven by the variations in the underlying process. NextGen supports three distinct but related process sets: Staging vs. Screening, Co-authoring vs. Presenting, Broadcasting vs. Interacting

Staging vs. Screening – Although related, these processes are sufficiently different to impact functionality. Screening implies a permanent exclusion of a group of users, whereas staging implies a communication process where a group is initially excluded but subsequently included, typically after certain milestones have been met. It is essential that the platform can swiftly reset from a state of exclusiveness to inclusiveness.

Co-authoring vs. Presenting – Collaboration can mean little more than sharing final work product with a peer group. In this simple case, the platform needs to support a simple dynamic of granting the authorized users access, but without the right to change the underlying content. At other times, collaboration means a form of co-authoring where two or more professionals create or edit content. This of course implies more stringent access control. Another use case would be document mark-up done through annotation or highlighting where the underlying document is not altered. Regardless, the permission model must be sophisticated enough to understand how to correlate changes, notes and highlights with the associated user.

Broadcasting vs. Interacting – In the not-so-distant past, communication to a large group often took the form of a one-way update with no feedback desired or expected. In today’s business world, some form of interactivity is generally encouraged. The platform needs to support both cases and include the granular control to constrain communication streams where necessary.

Structure evolves over Time.

Process-driven environments tend to be stable over an extended period of time. Most board communication falls into this category. Board meeting schedules are defined well in advance, sometimes years, and most board members will stay on a board for several years at a time. But this level of stability is not necessarily present at the leadership team level. Team members may be added or removed more frequently, and movement is often correlated with milestone achievement or member expertise. M&A environments are created around a particular deal and only for a limited period of time. Temporary work spaces may be formed for external auditors and finance to collaborate around an audit. These changes in team composition are frequently the case in events-driven environments. An effective leadership team communication platform needs to support both common use cases.

It was this high degree of confidentiality and fluidity that led BoardVantage to build two essential elements into our NextGen platform architecture:

Granular Controls – A platform for leadership team communication requires access and process controls that are granular enough to capture a broad and evolving set of use cases.

Self-Sufficiency – Leadership team environments change at a lightening clip. Any delays in capturing changes will make the environment irrelevant and will alienate users. This means a premium should be placed on self-sufficiency – the ability to manage all aspects of the platform. Whether creating the team experience (e.g. TeamSpace formation), administering users (e.g. provisioning), managing content (e.g. remote purge) or delivering service (e.g. password reset), third-party reliance should be avoided.

The NextGen platform delivers a broad set of user-friendly administrative controls, and by allowing the permission model to exercise control over all communication streams, effectively places security in the service of collaboration.

Unfortunately, it does not square with reality. We learned that lesson early in the board portal market – where the ideal experience for a director, and that of a member of the CS Office, are virtually opposites. Yet both experiences should be tailored to expectations or the system will be frustrating to one or both of these key constituencies. This split model is also evident in leadership team communication where an executive and an administrator will also expect different experiences. Beyond a minimal amount of training – say 20 minutes – a typical executive is simply not open to spending time learning new tools.

That is why BoardVantage has abandoned the pursuit of that mythical typical user.

Rather than designing to a single user experience cluster based on a common use pattern, we develop our software to cover a spectrum of user experiences with the end points representing radically different requirements.  On one end of that spectrum lies “the consumer”, on the other end “the contributor”.

The Consumer

The consumer category includes members of the leadership team, typically executives and directors. They access the system on a periodic basis, but when they do, it is critical that they locate what they need promptly. Understandably, they value simplicity over all else. It’s for that reason the iPad has been an important new influence for this group. But whether they prefer a browser or the iPad doesn’t matter. The design principles to meet their needs transcend the device. They can be summarized as follows:

•       Configurability – Highlighting essential functionality while stripping out what’s redundant

•       Presentation – Enrichment through graphics, branding and, in the case of the iPad, animation

Observing these principles allows us to provide a compelling experience while leveraging the unique strengths of the underlying device.  But addressing only this user experience cluster is inadequate. That’s because the needs of the second constituency are diametrically opposite to the first.

The Contributor

In contrast to consumers, contributors “live in” the system. They rely on process functionality for hours at a time, often in high-pressure situations. While consumers are adverse to tools, contributors embrace their tools, particularly the Office suite. For them, high personal productivity in the system is a non-negotiable requirement. What they seek is:

•       Continuity – User experience paradigms that are modeled after the familiar desktop environment such as drag-and-drop, right-click, a folder tree structure etc. In effect what they require is an extension of their current environment.

•       Integration -  Tight coupling with existing desktop tools such as edit-in-native, calendar syncing, email alerts and  others

It is important to note that these experiences are diametric opposites, a barbell distribution. That is also the reason they present such a challenge. Nevertheless, both implementations need to be executed flawlessly if the product is to be accepted by the customer base. This involves a large investment in design. Today that means not just the browser, but also tablets – notably the iPad – and Android devices as they mature.

Meeting Rising Expectations

Simultaneously, driven by the superior esthetics and usability of consumer devices, customer expectations about user experience are rising. Business users routinely encounter first-rate UI design in their consumer apps only to be disappointed when they return to the office to use business apps. It’s no stretch to forecast that this discrepancy cannot last. Whether it’s a branded experience, desktop environment or the iPad, the bar is being raised. And this has ramifications for business software vendors.

Given the compounding effect caused by divergent user requirements, a multiplying number of platforms and rising customer expectations, successful designs must go well beyond touching up the look-and-feel to deliver a good user experience.

Sensitized by the user experience demands in the board portal space, we believe that staying ahead of these trends requires a modern architecture. This was a key factor in our decision to develop NextGen as an RIA (Rich Internet Architecture). Only modern frameworks are rich enough to accommodate the evolving needs of today’s customers. For BoardVantage, this meant a seven-figure engineering investment, but the pay-off is significant. Now, regardless of which end of the barbell a user represents, we are in a position to meet the ever-rising expectations for,  a more compelling user experience.

In addition to the seriousness of what was perpetrated, what shocked was the nature of the hack. Popular mythology has it that a phone hack requires deep technical expertise, but that was definitely not the case here. What the hackers took advantage of was the simple fact that many people don’t reset their voice mail passwords after signing up for the service. The absence of a password reset means that practically anyone can break in. All you have to do is use the default password issued by the phone company. That is, in fact, what happened in this case: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/world/europe/07phone.html?_r=2.

It strikes me that celebrities and other newsworthy individuals are not the only ones at risk. There are implications for directors of major corporations as well.

Even if you, as a director, are disciplined enough to secure your voice mail with an effective password, when you leave a message on someone else’s voice mail what guarantee exists that the recipient has done the same? Without a proper password on the part of the recipient, the sender of the voice mail is unknowingly exposed.

How many directors are aware of this risk? It is widely assumed that certain communication media are more secure than others. The phone is considered one of the more secure forms, thought to be virtually immune to breaches. As this episode has highlighted, this is a falsehood. On the other hand, directors have always been aware of the risk surrounding email communication. It is time that they treat voice mail in the same way they treat email – with extreme caution.

Here’s something to consider: if you are a director, and you need to leave a message on a sensitive topic, skip the phone and instead use a system designed and tested for secure communications.

So the question that we asked a couple of years ago, how to adapt the consumer models to the needs of leadership teams, is more relevant today than ever. It was obvious then that social media was an ever-strengthening force, and that it was only a matter of time before it would play a role in leadership communications.  On the other hand, there was an argument to dismiss these models entirely as nothing but a distraction.  After all, did we really expect boards and leadership teams to spend their time photo sharing?

Looking around the software market we noticed some vendors touting Facebook-style walls to improve enterprise collaboration. Those examples were compelling at first until it became apparent that they illustrated use at the lowest levels of the enterprise, and unfailingly, in non-business-critical situations.  Of course, where confidentiality concerns are minimal and the stakes are low, it’s easy to improve communication – just open up access! The problem is that doing so will sacrifice process along the way.  Perhaps that trade-off works in some organizations and at some levels, but it would backfire painfully at the top. When you’re charged with the safekeeping of highly confidential board documents, proliferation of content is not an option.

The second problem was executive role complexity. Rarely discussed, but critically important nonetheless, it is a reality that executives wear many different hats. They invariably hold stakes in a wide range of initiatives.  That role complexity, pervasive among executives, is simply not existent among the rank and file.  It is for that reason that consumer networks and their simple corporate adaptations, may work great at the department level, but have little value at the executive level. Without a richer model to address this challenge these networks would never be a viable option for the leadership team.

That is the reason we built the NextGen architecture with a capability to segregate sensitive communication streams.  Inside the platform, ring-fenced TeamSpaces let executives create destinations for open and direct communication without chancing information leaks. It gives them focal points for collaboration where they can share information using a range of traditional (e.g. shared repository) and social (e.g. feeds) tools. In effect what we’re doing is using ‘social’, not as standalone functionality, but as an organizing principle. The social paradigm is integrated at the core of the platform where a permission model exercises control over all content and communication flows. This assures that no content can proliferate outside its permissible boundaries.

At BoardVantage we agree that much of the promise of social media resides in sharing but, when applied to leadership teams, it cannot be done in isolation. The challenge is to strike a balance between the need to share and the need to maintain control. Q2 was significant for us in this context because it was the first quarter that we began implementation in over a dozen F-500 customers of these multi-TeamSpace arrays. In Q3 we will post updates on the most interesting of these as we progress with additional customers.

• We continued to broaden our footprint beyond board portals, serving the leadership teams of major organizations. New customers include Amdocs, Medco, Nielsen, Readers Digest, Roche and Questar.
• International highlights include a major win with Tate & Lyle, a global organization and well-known UK brand. We furthered our regional coverage with the appointment of Blake Dawson, one of Australia’s top law firms to act as our solution partner for Australasia.
• On the product side, we launched a significant enhancement to our iPad app, with Briefcase – the first truly secure way to provide fully controlled and encrypted offline content for the iPad. This has proven to be a boon for IT teams concerned about the potential for iPad attack vectors, and an area that no other vendor has seriously addressed.
• This continued investment in technology has paid off in terms of increasing industry recognition, most notably by our iPad app being featured by Apple on their own website, and chosen from more than 20,000 other business apps.
• Security was high on the agenda for many this quarter. This interest was reinforced by more than 300 attendees of our webcast about security with Directors & Boards magazine, who learned about our unique approach and how we are able to meet the demands of F-100 IT departments, including major financial institutions.
• Finally, keeping pace with our growth has increased our demands for both staff and space to house everybody. To that end, we moved into a larger new state-of-the-art facility in Menlo Park.

As ever, I’d like to thank our customers for their business, trust and feedback that has enabled BoardVantage to become the leader in secure collaboration for boards and leadership teams. We have an exciting schedule of announcements this quarter, so stay tuned!

Corporate America has been quick to embrace this trend externally, primarily for marketing purposes, but has been noticeably slower in their adoption internally. That dichotomy is understandable. The security of these networks is broadly regarded as weak and the potential for leaks of confidential information is great.

But what hasn’t been talked about to the same extent, and what is an equally grave impediment to broad adoption, is the simplistic relationship model embedded in those networks. Without a richer model to address role complexity of the typical professional in the modern workplace the value of social networks as a collaboration tool is dubious at best.

It is this latter aspect that was foremost on our mind when we set out to reach beyond our traditional board market and build a collaboration platform for leadership teams. Reconciling the needs for security and simplicity is a technical challenge for many engineering teams but, for BoardVantage, with our extensive experience in the board portal market, it is a core competency. The greater difficulty lies in the proper capture of multiple roles which are needed to support the normal social functioning of the workplace, and which are routinely combined in a single person (e.g. direct report, peer, manager, etc.).

We viewed enriching the model as the central architectural challenge, one that could only be addressed with a reinterpretation of established concepts. However, if successful, it would be the keystone to fulfilling the requirement of capturing multiple roles. Below I will delineate the five key elements of the architecture we developed.

1. TeamSpace-Driven Content and Communication
In our model TeamSpaces are shared environments that function as the focal points for confidential collaboration. They form the backbone of our architecture, permeating every aspect of our design. Individual spaces are configurable with a rich functionality to support a range of knowledge worker roles and workplace process. Since knowledge work commonly relies upon a combination of content, process and communication, TeamSpaces are equipped as such.

2. User-Driven Content and Communication
The architecture also designates a class of content as being user-driven. This class represents any content under the exclusive control of the user. Among others this class includes such items as an alert inbox, a document ‘briefcase’ and status information.

This distinction allows a user to maintain exclusive control over private information even while working in a shared-content space. User-driven content is portable so it’s at the individual’s disposal at all times, irrespective in what TeamSpace the user resides at any given time.

3. TeamSpace Arrays
TeamSpaces are often networked. They can be snapped into a collection of spaces, creating a TeamSpace Array. This permits segregation of the roles which users play across the various groups in which they collaborate. Because spaces are ring-fenced, the role played in one TeamSpace does not spill over to the role played in an adjacent one.

4. TeamSpace Backplane
A TeamSpace Array can serve as proxy for the multiple roles a professional plays in the modern workplace. But this concept only works if a user can navigate between multiple spaces — swiftly. That’s why the architecture deploys a secure backplane. Controlled by permissions, this model lets individual users jump back and forth between spaces quickly and securely.

5. Permission Model
TeamSpaces are access-controlled, but that does not mean that should be one-size-fits- all access, once inside. Consider the example of a calendar schedule. Even if a schedule isn’t confidential, it is generally considered to be privileged to the individual. While every TeamSpace is ring-fenced against intrusion by outsiders, within the space any asset, whether a document, event or otherwise is access-controlled under a permission model. The model is flexible enough to support real-world cross-hierarchical use cases.

Using this framework the NextGen architecture has proven to function in a range of collaboration initiatives by different types of knowledge workers. The model balances the concerns of confidentiality with the real needs to share. Equally important it addresses the need for multiple roles in the modern workplace in an effective and elegant manner.