I was scanning through LinkedIn earlier when up popped an update with a great picture of 3 massive interactive screens showing a bunch of interactive charts, graphs & wizzy visualisations. It was posted by someone from SAP proclaiming this is what the future boardroom will look like.

Looking through most of the comments, of which there were over a thousand, most were focused on how great this looked, "...powerpoint is dead...", "...I want those screens for my gaming..." .

Not one comment said anything about, what is the singular most important thing to come out of any meeting....actions. What’s the point of having a meeting if at the end of it the decisions made are not tracked and actioned.

This got me thinking about my recent travels. Both large and small companies that I visit all have one thing in common no matter how much they spend on technology. Whiteboards. There continues to be a plethora of whiteboards around with scribbled notes/tasks/actions/to-do's...

The nearest I got to somewhere that had no whiteboards was a government department that had invested many thousands on Apple products with lots of apps. They would use their tablets in meetings to keep track of actions & decisions. But even these guys had this information separated from the data it was related to. So when it come to the next meeting they would have to scrabble round from the previous meeting notes to discover what had been agreed and the decision process behind it.

Now I maybe a bit slow at times, but isn't it a no-brainer having the ability to instantly update and create actions/tasks/forecasts at the time you see the data and having those actions/tasks/forecasts linked to the specific piece of data/measure at that specific time automatically so that anyone in the future, whenever they look at the data also see the complete decision making process and outcomes at the same time.

Wouldn't it be even better if instead of scribbling on whiteboards or lots of emails you could have those conversations and create those tasks somewhere that everyone who had an interest in those outcomes could access.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a product that could enable all that....oh wait there is, and its been around 25 years, and I work there.

Aden Maine

Head of Marketing

Aden has been at InPhase for 7 years. With a background in digital marketing and web design, it's Aden's job to keep the marketing team moving forward.