The Role of Technology in Enhancing Corporate Governance

With technology playing an important role in almost every aspect in the corporate life, one may question how it could help in enhancing corporate governance. Corporate governance is key in safeguarding the interests of stakeholders and shareholders. One of corporate governance’s key elements is transparency. Such transparency allows board members to be held accountable for their actions through the access to corporate information granted to shareholders and stakeholders.

To achieve transparency and thus, to promote better governance practices, corporations can currently resort to a myriad of tech solutions ranging from electronic board portals to software that enhances corporate accountability.

Board portals like those designed by Diligent and BoardPad, generally enables board members of a given corporation to communicate securely and provides range of corporate functions such as voting tools and meeting minutes. These solutions enable better corporate transparency, promotes communication among board members and enhances corporate accountability particularly given these portals help in simplifying the auditing and compliance environment allowing better access for shareholders, stakeholders and regulators.

Moreover, technology can further enhance transparency in board voting through the ability to search ballots and results along with the option to filter results by count or percentage. These solutions further allow for different voting formats from box-ticking options to paragraph responses which allows for better transparency and accessibility to corporate decisions.

Additionally, as corporations incorporate tech solutions further, the need to maintain privacy and security of its decisions and actions becomes of paramount importance and thus, the issue of security becomes an additional pillar of maintaining better governance. These security solutions are crucial in restricting access to unauthorized users to corporate communications.

With these brief examples of how technology is currently playing a role in enhancing corporate governance, the question of what more can technology do to further help in promoting better governance arises