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Shifting Modes: Adaptation Necessitates Adoption
Joe Way, PhD, CTS
Money’s no object when you have none. That was the common theme around COVID-19 response spending in higher education. Keep the doors open and avoid tuition refunds was the name of the game early on. But that changed.
It changed when the value of distance learning was realized. As mentioned at the HETMA Spring ’21 Conference last month, before COVID, academic institutions were still debating about the validity of online learning. That all disappeared when it was all we could do. We know that Zoom instruction is not classroom instruction. There are limitations. But we adapted. Students adapted. We learned to use our tools more effectively. Faculty learned to teach more effectively. Higher ed adapted.
Tech managers quickly became the true subject matter experts, earning the proverbial “seat at the table.” The bills-of-material we sought after for years—and were continually denied—all of a sudden became a “let’s go!” rally cry to save the school year. Some institutions went big with hybrid learning and investment in instructional design, while others tried to just get by in hopes of a quick return to normal. That was short-lived because the reality of a full return in the fall was soon wiped away by skyrocketing COVID numbers and societal lockdowns. A change had to happen. We had to prioritize for the long haul.
And now, twelve months into “two weeks to flatten the curve,” what have we learned about our business model? Here we go, I’ll say it… the only way to ensure longterm success is to move to an AV as a Service (#AVaaS) model. Now, I don’t mean that we need to outsource all our support services, but we must move to a flexible, subscription-based AV ecosystem in physical on-prem, virtual, and financial form.
When the pandemic hit, every piece of AV equipment sitting in our classrooms immediately became very expensive paperweights. The rest of the world proved that we didn’t need all that “stuff” for quality education to happen. All we needed was a computer, tablet, or phone with camera, microphone, and speaker, along with some virtual communications platform like Zoom, Teams, or Google Classroom. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less. And that’s the takeaway. In the IT world, leasing computers and subscribing to a software platform is old-hat; it’s what they do. It’s time for AV to follow-suit.
Moving forward, every single classroom design must start with a soft communication platform first, followed by how we want to send and receive the information to and from it. “How do we want to experience the platform in this space” is what we should be asking. A node-based AV ecosystem allows for faster pivoting, less downtime, and added flexibility. Many manufactures were already reframing their hardware to accommodate for this change (i.e., Crestron with their Flex line and move to Fusion/XiO Cloud). With AV in “soft” form as its core, each space simply becomes a question of “how” you want to input and output to the communications platform. High quality or low quality mics may depend upon the use case for the room. Single or multiple displays or projects will depend upon the use case for the room. To survive we must move away from the “AV switcher” mentality where a space can only be as good as the number of inputs and outputs on the little black box.
The move to as-a-Service (aaS) requires one more major change in the way the AV industry operates: our financial procurement practices must adapt. The key to successful subscription-based models is direct-to-consumer selling. This is exactly how IT has been doing it for decades, including the biggest players in the UC market like Zoom and Microsoft. To make AVaaS work, AV manufacturers and solutions providers must let end users/customers buy direct—or at minimum through the same distribution partners that integrators purchase from. The ability to quickly adjust to changing demands requires that we are able renegotiate feature sets, account limits, etc., and have them activated or deactivated at a flip of a switch. We must treat our backend AV ecosystem as a utility.
Is this a big change for me as the guy who created the #AVaaSMustDie hashtag? Indeed it is. But the pandemic proved the model. The change in technology proved the model. And now the industry must adopt the model.
About the Column
The higher ed AV vertical is over a five-billion-dollar sector of the commercial AV integrations industry. Add in the live events, and higher ed accounts for over ten-billion-dollars annually. That’s significant, and why tech managers in our vertical must treat our departments like big business. Every month, Joe Way, PhD, CTS, explores important aspects of business operations, sales, negotiation, finance, and strategy based on over 25 years’ experience in business development, founding and managing several multimillion-dollar companies in the entertainment industry.
The Author: Joe Way, PhD, CTS
Joe Way, PhD, CTS, is the Director of Learning Environments at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, CA and AV Nation 2019 AV Professional of the Year. He is the host of the Higher Ed AV podcast and co-founder of the Higher Education Technology Managers Alliance (HETMA.org), aimed at connecting the higher ed tech manager community and advocating for their common audiovisual needs. He is the author of the bestselling book, Producing Worship: A Theology of Church Technical Arts, is a regular contributor to leading AV-industry media outlets and podcasts, and serves on the AVIXA Tech Managers and Diversity Councils. Joe is an Orange County, CA, native with over 25 years’ experience in education, technical production and the arts, and organizational leadership and management. Over his career, Dr. Way has received diverse awards in the areas of education, the arts, and business, and is a regular keynote speaker and writer for AV-industry and higher ed conferences and media outlets.