Optimizing Board Operations with Dropbox: A Case Study (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: The other big component was Dropbox is what we've been using. We've got way more space on there than we need. I think it's like 50 gigabytes, which is a lot. And it's working very well for us. We've worked with it in taking all of our archived materials, because in the past we had to take some of that stuff off and store it on CDs because there was only so much space under the old system. We're now able to take all the archived stuff, put it back up there, so we've got access to everything through the net. And I can even access it through the smartphone if need be. So it's been marvelous that way. You can also, with Dropbox, create separate files that you can invite people into. So for committee work, we have been going through a board restructuring recently, where we're going from a board of 27 down to a board of 13, which is going to keep me very busy because it's a whole culture change in the way we approach our governance and management and strategic direction and everything else, which is exciting and is part of the challenge we needed to do to face the challenges that are coming at us. So it's good stuff. But in that process, both with the nominating committee and the committee that was doing a lot of the implementation on the new structure, we used the Dropbox technique where files were put in there, people could comment on them, people could add additional thoughts, create new documents, put them up there, just let people know. They could pull them down, make the changes. It really worked very slick. And similarly for the nominating committee, it really worked well for us in getting the information into one spot where everyone had access to it. I think we saved a few trees, and supporting the environment, that was a good thing for us. Just being able to look at stuff digitally rather than have to print up all those files. So that worked out well. And I can see, moving forward, we'll have an area where the board will be able to archive past minutes, past reports to the board, we'll be sitting there. And the nice thing about it is you can invite people in to use it, and you also have control to uninvite them. So if someone leaves the board and doesn't need to have access to it anymore, you can uninvite them. Nice way of saying it, I guess.