Over the past decade or so, I have been rather lucky to have the opportunity to observe and understand the state of audiovisual and videoconferencing environments across various organizations. For the most part, things work pretty solidly. At least for users. But beyond that, most organizations that I have seen have never really taken things to the “next level,” or, while they have taken steps in that direction, it’s not been a huge goal.

The problem with the next level, however, is that there is no real consensus on what that looks like.

In a past article, I wrote about the various stakeholders that we need to satisfy in order to have an AV estate that meets all the needs of the business. As a short recap, they are:

• The users
• The room owners (real estate, IT management, finance)
• The support team
• The internal AV team

When it comes to how the room works on a day-to-day basis, that — of course — maps to the users. But when we look at the other stakeholders, specifically the room owners, there is so much more that needs to be done in order to ensure that we are both aligned with ITIL practices and able to make use of the data that exists in the various ITSM systems (regarding HOW systems are being used). Then, of course, we must ask: How do we evolve to the future? Whether it is something monumental like porting from Teams to Zoom or as mundane as a new camera system that employs AI to feed us data about how rooms and spaces are used … how do we evaluate, test, deploy and scale these changes?

TL;DR: Users need consistent, reliable high-availability rooms. Management needs to know all about how the rooms are being used.

This is the goal of a mature AV environment. In this article, I want to talk about what defines it, and how it maps to our stakeholders.

First Phase of a Mature AV Estate — The Rooms

The physical rooms in an environment are the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. They are also the most critical of the overall AV stack. The decisions that are made here ensure a variety of things: usability, system quality, budget, etc. If the users can’t reliably make good-quality calls, then nothing else matters. Getting the rooms to a working, consistent state is job number one. Feedback I have had in talking to a variety of IT executives over the years proves this is not a given. My favorite will always be the CTO of a Silicon Valley meal delivery company whose first question to me at an event was “Why does AV never *&#@ing work?”.

At a company I worked for years ago, it had a VC platform that was so unreliable, certain call configurations would ALWAYS result in a dropped call at 29 minutes 59 seconds. Trying to get to the bottom of that almost cost me my job. But once we cracked it, the amount of VC that we were doing rapidly escalated (turned out there was a single network rule buried in the stack of over 10,000 rules that would kill a certain type of packet just prior to 30 mins.). Without consistent five-star call experiences, users won’t use it.

Anyone walking into an enterprise AV environment looks at the AV/VC stack and has three key goals in their mind:

1. Stabilize
2. Standardize
3. Scale

Fortunately, there is no shortage of people with knowledge and expertise to ensure that phase one is addressed. The only thing that really matters is the commitment to the time and budget involved in getting there.

This is job one. The whole reason the field even exists is so users can seamlessly use the technology. This is the main thing that everyone in the AV world thinks about. On the plus side, most companies have reasonable “standards” these days, (my thoughts on standards can be found here).

I say reasonable because while most AV estates out there are in a state of flux, they all seem to vary wildly in their maturity. We’ve seen everything from just a general understanding of “this is what we use,” to a few PowerPoint slides loosely describing the equipment involved, to fully version-controlled document packages that spell out wiring, software versions, etc.

Regardless of your progress in the process of standardization, it’s pretty likely that some of your estate is in flux. You have some old rooms/floors/buildings/campuses that still need to be brought up to the newest version of the standard. This is a big part of why standardization is key, so that you can track and support multiple versions of rooms. Then, of course, we have to deal with changing aspects of the systems we have deployed to all these rooms like the calling platform, routing systems, etc.

While we can indeed have a standardized, consistent experience, it is fair to say that change management will always be at play.

Therefore, we must be constantly looking at how standards evolve as new tech comes to the market.

This brings us to the Second Phase … and an entirely new set of issues and skill sets.

Second Phase of a Mature AV Estate — The Back End

AV is not a unique discipline. Yes, I know this is heresy to say in the AV world, but the reality is that it simply isn’t. It IS, however, a subdiscipline of IT. We exist within the IT organization, for the most part, and serve the end goals of the IT organization. (Yes, I am aware that there is a growing trend where AV sits inside the real estate/facilities org, but the goals are still the same.)

As a consequence of this, it is critical that along with serving the needs of the users, we also serve the business requirements and needs of the IT organization. And the needs of that organization are defined by the 5 volumes of ITIL (I wrote a series of four different articles talking about AV and ITIL), and executed via the ITSM platform in use by the organization.

Once all the rooms are working reliably (and there is a solid standard in place that ensures replication of end-user experience no matter where in the world your rooms are), while still having the flexibility to deal with different product availability, etc., life will seem great. Until the other needs of the business start to become a bigger part of the day-to-day. Over time, the folks that own IT and the rooms will have a greater need to see the data on how the rooms are used. Those OTHER stakeholders are going to start asking deeper questions.

• The room owners (real estate, IT management)
• The support team (help desk, remote AV support vendors)
• The internal AV team

Here are a few examples;

• I once got asked by the CTO… “how many TVs do we have in the company?” Unfortunately at that stage in that organization, the response was “I can’t even tell you how many rooms we have!” We just didn’t have the data. And we were not alone in that quandary.
• A business unit felt they did not have enough Zoom Rooms in their building. So we had to determine if this was the case. This is a great example of the VC platform providing the info that we wanted, but not the granularity we needed.
• How about “We are looking to sell Building XYZ, we just want to walk away as much as possible. Can I get an inventory with both replacement cost and net book value on all the AV inventory in it? Oh, and we need it by tomorrow at the close of business.”

When looked at through the lens of traditional ITIL practices, the above questions should result in an hour or two of work. For the most part, the ITSM platform (ServiceNow, Oracle, Jira, etc) is likely already set up to show reports and dashboards that show (as a few examples),

• Number of laptops broken down by PC/Mac, model and the depreciated value
• Number of desktops by model and the depreciated value
• Number of servers by model and the depreciated value

They can, of course, get as granular as you like (provided it was set up properly in the first place). They can do this as the process, and expectations are defined via ITIL practices and everything is tracked. All of the equipment is asset tagged and is inside their ITSM platform of choice.

In the IT world, this is the baseline. This is the most basic expectation.

Can you do that? If not, you need to start exploring how to do so. It isn’t just a case of doing an inventory. At a company I used to work for, my director was rather nearsighted when it came to AV. When I spoke of the complexity of the task at hand and the serious tech debt we were going to have to reconcile, his response was that “the last time we needed an inventory, we all just worked long hours over a weekend and ordered lots of pizza!” 😑 OK boss … then why do we need to do another one three years later?

As far as the usage of rooms in that one building, the task was simple in nature — create a report that shows all the rooms in the building by floor with the percentage of occupancy/video usage. Simple, right? Four hours later, after pulling down numerous spreadsheets and then correlating them together, looking up working hours/week and then creating some pivot tables, we were able to show that NO … they were not lacking rooms. They just seemed to have an issue finding rooms. That of course opened up a whole different issue to solve for.

And as far as selling the building … I personally started to sweat when I got the call because it was clear that getting that report was going to be ugly.

So, if you can’t answer the question, “How many TVs do we have?” You need to take a closer look at your back end. You need to build a process that allows things to be inventoried, taken out of service, moved from room to room or from campus to campus, because if your estate is anything like most organizations I have worked for, that inventory will be out of date within a month or less. It starts with the rooms themselves.

This is the junction where AV and IT TRULY converge. Not just in the realm of AV sitting on the network — that is the easy and natural progression part. But in taking a full seat at the high table of IT by adopting and embracing an ITIL methodology. This only fully happens when we speak the language and meet the expectations that are a part of all the other IT disciplines.

This is where we have to really dig deep. While there are tools to solve many of these problems (from companies like Crestron, Extron, Utelogy, Innomate and others), they are by no means equal. The deeper you dive into them, the more you will see that some of them are AV solutions that seek to answer IT problems, and some are IT solutions that seek to bring AV into the fold. Any solution needs to correlate all this disparate data from Zoom/Teams/etc. as well as from the LG TVs and the Jabra cameras and the Neat boards, etc., and make it all available in one place (I also talked about data and devices in a previous article).

While in some cases, the platforms of these manufacturers may be an acceptable solution, ultimately, we also need to be able to make that data available in the more traditional tools of the IT world. Programs like Splunk, or platforms like ServiceNow, Remedy, Jira Service Management, etc. The objective is a single pane of glass for all organizational data. So not only do we need the aforementioned manufacturers to do their voodoo (collecting data through IP, serial communications, etc.), we also need to harness ITSM experience to develop these other solutions and all they entail. We can’t give the IT and real estate management teams different dashboards with different logins, we need to be able to take the relevant info and add it to what they are already using.

While the portals for the leading VC providers give lots of information about the calling data, and some limited information about the equipment in use, it is typically not enough to meet the ITIL needs of most larger enterprises. As a result, we need to explore ways to take in all that data and have the flexibility to present in a manner that aligns with the ITSM/ITIL needs of the business.

The great part of this is that for the most part, APIs on the platforms and individual equipment are getting more robust all the time. This means that we have the ability to capture that data and put it to use with the tools already at our disposal. The harder part of this is that for an AV team with traditional AV skills, we are typically not prepared for the work that needs to be done in this area. But these skills are fairly easy to come by in the IT world, so this is a problem that can be easily rectified. The reality is that to be a full-service provider these days, you need professionals from both the AV side and the IT side. You need Crestron programmers and people that can write Python, are Splunk-certified and can do ServiceNow development work as well.

Ultimately, no solution will work everywhere. We need to architect solutions that work for how that enterprise functions. At one company I previously worked for, if the data was not in ServiceNow … it just didn’t exist. So any solution we came up with had to end up in ServiceNow reports and dashboards. Other organizations might be totally fine with a Utelogy or Crestron report. And in some cases, maybe it’s a growth thing. You might deploy an Extron solution right now, but knowing that you need to port it to Jira within 18 months.

No matter how you slice it, this is the most critical part of a mature AV estate. Getting there is not part of the standard AV level of expertise.

The great part is that once you get this second phase taken care of, you will have the visibility and the flexibility to offer far greater insight with regard to future planning. This takes us to the third phase, which we will explore in the next column (coming soon).