AV, Comms & Collaboration – Are Systematic Changes Needed?

After having spent over 10 years in the AV, Communications and Collaboration space, I frustratingly continue to feel the need for several systematic changes in the way we think in our industry.

So what is this griping all about then?

Are we boxing ourselves in?

I’ve attended a few panels and discussions revolving around the subject of The Future of AV in the Enterprise. You may have noticed the sponsors or equipment manufacturers are often on the panel. No disrespect to anyone and they are well within their right to lead industry conversations, and I don’t doubt their merit.

However, these conversations time and again revolve around statements such as, “This camera or this device is the future”. These conversations are inadvertently changing focus of the discourse towards ‘products’, away from the end-user experience.

Bear with me on this one – If I ask you “what’s the future of computing”, would you say, “Oh, these keyboards will be the future, or this graphics card, etc.”? No, you’d likely say, computers synthetically built into us will help us defy the limits of our human abilities, maybe?

And that’s what we should be thinking about when asked the future of AV in the enterprise.

That’s what we do very well because we take this line of thought very seriously. In fact, there’s:

• Formally enshrined nomenclature: ‘Systems-Thinking: the sum of all parts”, which entirely dictates how designers, engineers, project managers, account managers and marketing/PR are encouraged to think.

Solutions are a ‘system, in-principle’ designed to solve a problem. The best-in-class equipment being the parts that make up the system and work together in tandem. Why aren’t we all thinking on the same lines?

And these parts aren’t necessarily hardware either. You have an app that works with standardised equipment in a room, a communications hub in the room that allows secure communication to the mobile app using the internet as the common and secure network.

The hub is also cloud connected so hardware isn’t frozen in time at the day of install, and can be remotely monitored and administered.

Sidetracked by the Smartphone

Here’s our internal memo:

“No, the isn’t going to be at the centre of the AV universe”

This is because we perceive the OTT glorification of the smartphone, vastly misplaced. No doubt they will continue to play a very critical role, but we might be losing sight of ground realities.

We love our smartphones! Can you imagine your day without them?

But honestly, how many people do I know who’ve afforded this centrality to the smartphone in their daily work routine? They’re not using them to get work done, or to store files, edit or annotate presentations like we hear so often. One may argue about the use of VM and access to files. Point is, these things on the smartphone are not commonplace, and certainly not second nature to us.

I just want to get on with it

Why am I saying this? The reality is that people are still walking into rooms, talking, and sharing a power point from their PC or MAC until they finish.

Take for example, when we use drivers to connect your PC/smartphone to the video conferencing system. The Codec is on the PC/phone and you bridge the audio/video from the device to the room. This gets very problematic as we’ve noted in our POC testing, largely due to the PC not routing audio to the room system. Typical users did not understand how to tell the PC to use a different audio source over USB.

Going back to my previous point on ‘systems-thinking’, why aren’t we thinking about the many features on smartphones that we can bring into system design to help the end-user make meetings easy?

For example, search and auto check-in to meeting rooms based on beacon technology, or auto-starting the meeting via beacon technology as well rather than imagining a future where people are file sharing, or using the phone to initiate the meeting or control the room.

My understanding: People have little interest in complexity. They don’t want to “control”. They want to walk-in, have a meeting and leave.

Without systems-thinking, your focus may easily veer towards complicated integration, which people aren’t going to know how to use (and ay not care as much as we might think). It isn’t uncommon to find integrators and AV leaders making too large and complicated “ecosystems”.

This also explains why a majority of basic functionality huddle and small conference rooms are gravitating towards self-launching, network-based appliances.

We have this understanding down to an art. In our opinion (and technology exists), the room should control itself – the audio should be tuned properly, so you shouldn’t need to adjust volume (much, anyway). Sharing content should be automatic not manually pushed by any controls. Muting? Well, that can be accomplished with the proper mic. on the table. The only feature we should think about is control is maybe adding a call into the meeting that’s not already invited. Everything else should be automatic.

In other words

We’ve started to introduce benchmarks for design and engineering such as ‘time-to-start’ and ‘Number-of-Interactions-to-Start’ using the room. Products, equipment, brand names, none of them matter much any longer because the customer doesn’t care much.

What they want is their presentation to auto-route, the call to auto-join, the system to count the number of attendees and report out, the meeting to commence trouble-free, audio to auto-tune, and the system to hang-up and auto-stop everything when they leave.

In short: End-users want in and out, no fuss and have the meeting be the focus. The future of AV in the enterprise is for the technology to cloak its physicality, things to automatically start, route and turn off. People will just start their meetings, and leave once finished to get on with their other tasks.

That, is the true future of enterprise AV – how we communicate, collaborate and get work done.

Guest blog by Chris Liebrand, Commercial Account Manager at Snelling Business Systems

Snelling Business Systems are one of the fastest growing Audio Visual integration specialists in the UK, with a vast portfolio of projects delivered for Corporate, Higher Education, Government and Public Sector. We deliver all aspects of audio visual integration from design, integration, supply, installation and on-going maintenance – all backed by a service ethic, which continues to carry the Snelling signature of quality.