Update: Post a comment then drop me an email (bill.french@ipadcto.com) if you’d like a free promo code for this app. Limited supply.

There are so many meeting planner apps available for iPad, but only one stands out as a vehicle for creating seamless connectedness between your company’s strategic plans and execution.

Peak Meetings, by Creating Thunder, has hit on an idea that has always seemed to escape the meeting management process. We hold meetings far too often that last far too long. And yet, few of them can actually be mapped to key performance metrics let alone, strategic plans.

It seems as though businesses, large and small suffer from a chronic disconnect between the many elements of a vision and the implementation steps necessary to reach for the visions. I believe that the glue that binds vision with implementation steps and details lay in the meeting planning and management DMZ.

Institutionalizing a process that creates a tightly bonded relationship between meetings and strategic plans is likely to pay big dividends. In my own business activities I’ve begun to use Peak Meetings to establish key touch-points that bind specific implementation steps with my strategic objectives.

Simple Example

As shown in the screen shot above, I’m working on a project that leverages Google Docs and Google Apps scripting to integrate business data with lightweight BI solutions. Google Docs has become the best alternative for companies that need to manage and collaborate on financial and operational data without spending a fortune on seat licenses for Microsoft Office.

On this strength also comes many other benefits including the collaboration and document sharing features of Google Docs. However, utilizing Docs-bound data for automated, and near-realtime dashboards requires a little scripting and a keen understanding of XML interfaces. My strategic vision is to help companies, who lack these resources, to liberate key performance data so that mobile dashboards can be created and maintained with little effort, no intrusion on current processes, and at affordable costs.

This is what the strategic vision looks like in Balanced Scorecard, also an iPad app for strategic planning.

This is a snapshot of recent planning meeting concerning this strategic initiative in Peak Meetings.

Successful Meetings Redefined

It’s obvious that the designers of Peak Meetings has really stepped outside the traditional scope of the definition of “meeting”. They’ve taken great liberty to innovate on the essential responsibilities of meeting planning and created a much broader concept that redefines what it means to have a successful meeting.

In this app, the envelope has been opened so widely that the mere process of setting up a meeting invites you to justify it in the context of strategic objectives. This app doesn’t make it easy for you to take the latitude of calling a meeting without expressing merit, conditions, and outcomes that everyone must be aware of.

If your company insists that this app is the framework for planning and managing meetings, a natural success pattern starts to emerge and a knowledge base reflecting intimate planning and execution details, begins to form. One must ask – have the app designers considered the inherent relationship between Peak Meetings content and the bigger scope of knowledge management, deep collaboration, and pervasive awareness tools such as RoamBI, Geckoboard, GroupME, and Present.ly?

It’s Not Just About Meetings

One thing I’ve noticed about this tool is it’s ability to function as an inward, thought-provoking planning tool. You don’t have to have a physical or virtual meeting to benefit from the process that Peak Meetings encourages.

In this context, where you may be the only attendee to a meeting, you might compare this app with note-taking tools, to-do lists, or other project management solutions. But unlike the unstructured approach many of these tools deliver, Peak Meetings provides structure to help you capture key data points when trying to flesh out ideas based on current business conditions and the facts necessary to accurately assess a given problem.

Peak Meetings, A Keeper

Peak Meetings is a keeper and it’s just one of those apps that raises the bar for companies that know just how useful iPad is as a business tool. Peak has the potential to change the meeting game in your company, and because of this, I have to give it one big ding – it needs better integration capabilities.

It could become so useful that the expectation of deep collaboration and integration with other systems is mandatory as it gains traction. As I mentioned above, the data embodied in this app is likely to become extremely valuable. If integrated wisely, it could represent a way to a voice corporate amnesia, potentially saving organizations lots of money in repeated mistakes.

We’re familiar with the phrase “Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die“. Meeting content is typically dead when the team folds up their notebooks and absconds with the remaining cookies and sandwiches. Peak Meetings is in a unique position to change the game before, during, and long after the meeting has ended.