Karbon Homes - A Customer Story
Click the image to download the case study
When good governance requires so many meetings with so many stakeholders, how do you remove the effort and cost from distributing and accessing information securely?
Karbon Homes is an organisation whose mission is to “provide people with a strong foundation for life.” To achieve this, they live by their values which include continually learning and being innovative.
While they had a system in place which was functional it was limited and no longer under development. In particular, Karbon wanted to add Multi-Factor Authentication to improve the security but this wasn’t available in their existing solution.
Following a highly successful trial, Decision Time has been rolled out throughout the organisation as the platform to organise, conduct and improve the effectiveness of their board, committees and other meetings.
The project team undertook extensive research, looking at six or seven different suppliers before getting demos of four products and talking to other organisations in the housing sector.
“Our Chief Executive had used Decision Time as a board member of Clanmil Housing Association in Belfast, so he put forward the recommendation. I spoke to the PA at Clanmil to ask her what she thought of it and how it had worked for them. We got good feedback, which led us to approach Decision Time and ask if we could have a demo, which then led to the trial.”
Jacquie Charlton Personal Assistant to the Group Chief Executive
Decision Time was selected as the preferred solution as the most intuitive and easy-to-use of all the systems considered, making it ideal for an organisation whose users have a wide range of IT skills. There was a broad acceptance that the user experience would play a crucial role in the adoption across the various boards, sub-committees, and leadership teams who use it.
“The demo we had from Decision Time was very concise, clean and quick - this is what you need to use it for, this is how it will work - it had everything for us. There was no pressure, everything was at our pace which was nice, whereas others are still chasing us to this day to buy a system we don’t need.”
Michael Taylor - Project Lead
A well planned and executed implementation process followed, ensuring that all users and support staff were comfortable using Decision Time. Comments from senior members of staff, directors and the project sponsor were all positive: "it has just worked and that’s what we wanted". Another strength of Decision Time’s offering was the level of support and training provided, it was both responsive and very helpful. Whilst the system is very simple to use, there was a commitment to ensure a smooth transition which put both the organisers and meeting participants at ease.
“The other thing we liked about Decision Time was that they were so friendly, easy going and approachable. Nothing was ever an issue or a problem and we got a lot of confidence from that. The relationship we have built up has been really important and I think it will be going forward as well.”
Very quickly the benefits of using Decision Time were apparent for both organisers and attendees. The system is designed to take the pain out of creating an agenda, adding documents, managing attendance and distributing meetings packs and minutes, saving hours of time.
For meeting attendees there are significant benefits too, providing all the information needed in a straightforward interface allowing them to read their papers, annotate them, make and share notes and ask questions, improving the quality of the meetings by ensuring everyone is prepared and focused on the essential issues.