Joining, working on and leading a committee – 7: online tools in support of committee work

This is my seventh installment in a series on committees, and on joining, working on and leading them (see my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 2, postings 206-211 for parts 1-6.) So far I have written about committees themselves, and a best practices approach for developing effective committees per se. I have also written about bringing the right people onto the right committees, and about the first organizational meeting for a new committee. And I have started discussion of recordkeeping and documentation with a posting on meeting minutes, for where that level of structure and formality would make sense. I turn in this posting to recordkeeping and documentation in general, and to the issue of developing shared information resources that would facilitate a committee and its members.

I have written several times about intranets and web 2.0 enabled intranets, and about use of social media and interactive web-based resources in building a more effective information architecture for a business or organization (see for example, Connecting an Organization Together, version 2.0.) Interactive online tools can facilitate committees as they map out and address the goals of their charter, (see Part 1.) and in fact can at times be useful tools in collaboratively working on the tasks set by that charter too.

A range of fundamental questions arise when determining how to translate these general principles into specific terms that would offer value for your committee and its members. Some of them, included here as a basis for further discussion would be:

• What is your committee going to be doing that would call for ongoing documentation?
• What types of documentation are going to be needed? This often includes work in progress notes and other task-specific information resources, and it also often includes white papers and other background information relevant to the committee and its charter.
• This can and usually does include collaborative conversations and information sharing where subgroups of a committee work together on specific tasks or issues relevant to the committee charter as a whole, and both for their own work and for reporting back to the committee as a whole. And when committee members are geographically disbursed, online collaboration tools can become essential.
• What types of interactive and group-organized information tools do you need? It is important to remember that this can go beyond simple text management documents such as word processor software, to include spreadsheet and database tools, presentation tools and more.
• Match tools to needs, so for short and more real-time note sharing consider instant messaging (IM) or short message service (SMS) tools.
• Are some information resources going to be set up to be read-only? Basic charter and background documents and related information resources may fit in there. Are some information resources going to be used collaboratively by subgroups of the committee, tasked to work on specific areas of the charter? What should be both visible and updatable to the committee as a whole, and should any external stakeholders be included in any of this? If so, how? That means by what tools and it also should include whether they would have only read-only access.
• What types of tools would be needed to support all of this activity? Note that this includes matching tools to information flow needs, but it also should include tools that offer visible editing histories where appropriate so anyone reading would know both what changes are made in a document and where, and who made those changes.
• Access control and security are going to be an issue wherever sensitive information is discussed, and the more complex the information flow and how it is divided up for approved and expected access, the more complex this set of issues becomes. Include a document access control tool or similar resource in your system here too, if and when needed.
• Are you planning on hosting all of this in-house and on local servers and other hardware resources as maintained by your IT department, or would some of this be hosted through third party providers such as Amazon cloud storage? This decision brings in issues of security and access, and of user support where questions or problems might arise and even at odd hours. And backup servers and related redundancy issues for insuring continuity of service are important here too. Note, for security management, and backup server and user support, a third party provider may be able to provide more robust and reliable solutions than your own in-house information management services can. This can be a core due diligence area of consideration.
• And as a final issue to add to this list, with points up to here drawn from a larger range of possibilities, will you allow or even encourage bring your own technology solutions from members of your committee, where they use their own hardware, software, or internet connections to connect into your committee’s information management systems, and for doing work related to its charter? If so and for what information and under what circumstances? This requires set policy. (See my recent series on Navigating the Bring Your Own Tech Puzzle at HR and Personnel, as postings 73 and 75-77)

Even if your intent and your basic policy is to disallow bring your own tech from your employees, this is a situation where it can really help to include the types of resources that the people you need to work with are experienced with and comfortable using – and that can include tools and types of tools they use both at or away from work. So even if your business provides the technology itself, find out about and include suites of tools that your people will use so they can focus on charter goals and priorities and not on the issues and challenges of using the tools provided per se. And I will add that if you only push steep-learning curve or functionally limited tools on employees, that will incentivize them to bring in their own technology anyway and regardless of your due diligence and information security policy efforts.

Whether you provide all of the information management tools and related resources to be used for work through internal IT services, or allow your employees to do some or all of their part of this work on their own hardware and software, do due diligence on what you will allow and support and be ready to explicitly exclude resources that do not meet adequate due diligence standards. So as a negative example, I would never use a Facebook group or other resource provided through them to manage a part or area of a business committee’s work – or anything business-related involving sensitive information. Access by unintended third parties including advertisers is an ongoing problem and cause for concern there. Chose services and service providers with care, and do regular due diligence reviews with an eye towards keeping your technology inclusion and exclusion policies up to date. This means partnering with Information Technology for long term management of committee policy regarding the tools they hold expertise in.

The next installment in this series is going to follow up on some of the issues touched upon here, with a discussion of locally sited and geographically dispersed committee members, and the use of IT-intensive connectivity and participation tools such as cloud storage and computing and telepresence.

You can find this posting and others of this series at Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 2. I have also posted extensively on jobs and careers-related topics in my first Guide directory page on Job Search and Career Development.

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