InfoComm: Making AV a Strategic Advantage

By Cory Schaeffer
Director of Systems Solutions, QSC

In my current role, I am tasked to spend time working with global end-user clients. It’s been great to connect and talk with them in an effort to better understand their challenges with AV. Many of these global clients have learned that removing as many technology variables as possible gets them closer to delivering a consistent experience for their users.

Many of the companies I talk with are either going through or have gone through major changes with regards to their AV. There are strong trends among end users to centralize strategic AV decisions while maintaining tactical decisions and execution locally to suit their regional needs. Influenced by the IT world, many clients have embraced prevalent technology trends such establishing technology standards.

These organizations have a variety of capabilities and philosophies that they have developed over time. Those having the most success have adopted:

• Presence of strong, global AV leadership with strong executive support, budget and globally aligned resources.
• Active involvement or in-house capabilities for systems design with a clear vision of customer needs and use of technology.
• Well-developed and documented global AV standards.
• Well-defined internal processes to learn, evaluate, pilot and deploy AV technologies.
• ‘Less is more’ mentality that minimizes divergent system elements, integration points and variables in the AV system.
• Direct relationships with AV manufacturers of key system elements.
• Shortlist of preferred and experienced integration partners in all key regions.
• Extensive considerations for building lean support.

It’s clear that the path forward is itself, different from organization to organization; however, minimizing variables and standardizing is a key trait for companies that wish to provide a high quality, consistent, value-oriented suite of AV technologies to their end users.

This column was reprinted with permission from InfoComm International and originally appeared here.