How organizations can help build a sustainable environment, and on a global scale, has been front and center over the last year. We see it on the news, when reading online content, and we hear it from clients in our work at Farland Group — sustainability has increasingly become a topic of interest for many on our customer advisory boards.

We hear about many different strategy areas and areas of investment from clients for the customer advisory boards and councils that we help facilitate at Farland Group.

Have you ever thought about starting a customer advisory board? Where would you even begin? Who do you contact for help? And what is the benefit of establishing a board in the first place?

When developing Board meeting sessions we ask our clients to be clear about where they want advice. We ask them to consider the questions they have for the Board; where they need advice; and how  an external voice could help their thinking.

In our work at Farland Group, we talk to many different types of business leaders — CIOs, CTOs, EVPs, you name it. During our discussions, we ask them to prioritize topics and security is often top of mind. There are many reasons for the importance placed on security —the threat landscape is always changing, hackers are becoming more creative, vast amounts of data make it difficult to predict attacks, and the list goes on.

It’s only early February, but we’re full speed ahead into our spring meeting season here at Farland Group. As we plan for the coming months, below are a few items we work on sooner, rather than later, when pulling together an advisory board meeting.

As 2018 comes to a close and we look forward to the new year, I find myself reflecting on some of our priority areas at Farland Group — both for the boards we work on as well as my own day-to-day work. While we concentrate on these areas throughout the year, we need to maintain the momentum we began on January 2. Below are a few things that are imperative as we soon start the New Year.

How do you extend the value of a customer advisory board beyond those who participate in the meeting room to the rest of your organization? Here are a few of the most common challenges we see, and some recommendations to tackle them.