Traditionally, company boardrooms have been stiff and stodgy places, designed for one very specific purpose: to bring people together for highly structured, formal meetings. In fact, if I asked you to describe the interior of a typical corporate boardroom, you’d probably mention a long, rectangular table surrounded by attendees who sit there passively, listening to presenters click-through slide deck after slide deck… after slide deck.

I’m here to share the good news, though: All that’s changing.

Today, boardrooms are being transformed into what can only be described as “high-value collaboration centers,” able to accommodate interactive, multi-media content, real-time analytics, and participants who join in from locations all around the world. In short, they’re becoming innovative, dynamic, and increasingly regarded as essential places to achieve consensus and add to the company's bottom line.

We’ve seen that more and more CEOs are recognizing the growing importance of high-value collaboration centers, and they’re taking an increasingly proactive role in designing them. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to see that 23 percent of those polled by Altimeter said the CEO officially owns or sponsors the digital transformation initiative at their company. That’s up from 17 percent last year and second only to CIOs, who was cited as the most typical owners or sponsors of transformation initiatives at 28 percent.

What kind of solutions are CEOs looking for? Here’s what we’ve heard they would most like to improve about the technology in their company boardrooms:

1. CEOs want meeting prep to be straightforward and seamless. Whether it’s sales figures from a team dashboard, a video snippet from a product demonstration, or a bulleted list from a white paper, compiling content across platforms and devices should be hassle-free. CEOs want technology that enables information to be easily prepped, uploaded, and shared—ideally via a single, interactive digital canvas.
2. CEOs want advanced, integrated technologies that improve the meeting experience. In addition to key players in the room, it’s now routine for participants to join meetings from remote locations. When that happens, CEOs want everyone to feel equally engaged and part of the process. New approaches to display and collaboration software are vendor agnostic and provide compelling, immersive experiences that enable those attending to not only participate in discussions but also interact with data and contribute their own content. As we’ve mentioned before, another exciting innovation in this space is identity access management, which allows a participant’s profile and preferences to automatically appear on displays and other equipment as soon as they enter the room.
3. CEOs want meeting content to be preserved and easily accessible later. The latest executive boardroom technology offers content persistence (meaning that all documents, videos, annotations, can be preserved and accessed later). As a result, there’s less worry about note-taking during the meeting and more focus on what’s being presented, whether that’s organizational KPIs, strategies, metrics, or other data from the CEO dashboard. In addition, content persistence improves transparency by enabling easy access to meeting files so presentations can be reviewed at a later date.
4. CEOs want their boardrooms to drive business. Combining meeting room space with the right technology can improve the bottom line. After all, when data is presented as part of a highly immersive experience, it’s easier to engage, identify relationships, and even test hypotheses. That makes meetings more effective—for everyone, whether they’re sales teams eager to close more deals or company directors looking for new business opportunities.

There’s no getting around it: People will always need to meet in company boardrooms. But more and more CEOs recognize that the way information is presented—and how attendees interact with it—is changing rapidly. Today’s sophisticated display and collaboration solutions can help your company communicate ideas through rich visuals and content-centric experiences so that everyone in the boardroom works smarter and more efficiently.

Could your business benefit from a boardroom makeover? Go to Prysm.com to learn more about delivering high-value executive boardrooms for your company.