I had the honor of spending a day at the University at Buffalo recording conversations during the HETMA Roadshow, and somewhere between the classroom tours, vendor tables, education sessions, and eventually some real buffalo wings, one thing became pretty obvious to me. We spend a lot of time in AV talking about products, installations, ecosystems, standards, AV-over-IP, and whatever the next thing is going to be. Like a lot of time. All of those things matter, of course, because that’s what we’re paid to do. But after hours of manning the table and talking with the attendees, manufacture partners, integrators, and HETMA leaders, the same theme kept coming back… the best technological environments are built on relationships, not the stuff that pushes around ones and zeros.
That was no more seen that every educational session that was more of a demonstration of cross-campus collaboration than the “thing” they did. But don’t get me wrong, the things are incredible there. Some of the best installations I’ve seen in our industry.
I know to say that proper classroom installs are built on relationships, not technology, probably sounds overly simple, and not groundbreaking. We all know the benefit of solid partnerships. However, I think our industry often makes doing business much more complicated than it needs to be. Higher ed institutions are trying to do more with fewer resources, supporting increasingly complex environments, improving accessibility, and manage systems at scale, and all at the same time somehow still make the experience simpler for the person who walks into the room. And somewhere in the middle of all that, we need people willing to actually listen to each other from our channel partners to our campus stakeholders.
One of the most interesting things about the Buffalo Roadshow was seeing how many conversations went beyond traditional AV. There were people involved with classroom technology, facilities, learning management systems, instructional design, IT, networking, administration, and academic support. That is increasingly what our world looks like. We are no longer silos within the larger enterprise, we indeed are key stakeholders ourselves in the larger campus ecosystem. AV cannot operate as an isolated department anymore because the experiences we support do not exist in isolation. A classroom is technology, furniture, lighting, pedagogy, scheduling, accessibility need, networking, user support, content delivery, and all those people all working together to make it happen. It’s a true hub and spoke, with AV being the center it all revolves around. The organizations that understand that are going to build better environments because they are solving the entire experience instead of one isolated piece of it.
The University at Buffalo offered a great example of that thinking. It is textbook. Their approach to learning spaces has been built around standards for decades, but what stood out to me was how deliberately they coordinate across teams. When technology is being refreshed, that becomes an opportunity for facilities, planning, classroom support, and other stakeholders to look at the room together instead of everyone coming through separately. That sounds like common sense until you think about how many institutions still do piecemeal planning. The type of relationship-first coordination as demonstrated at the University at Buffalo lowers disruption, protects investment, and creates a better result for the people actually using the space. I know the argument I’ll hear back from some is that they don’t have the budget to do these major “all-at-once” projects, but it’s not about the money to do the amazing, it’s about having a plan. It’s about all stakeholders understanding what piece of the puzzle they are accountable for and everyone working together to move the whole institution forward.
Another theme that came up repeatedly was simplicity. Almost every manufacturer I talked with described some version of the same customer request… Please just make it work, make it reliable, make it manageable, and please Lord, do not make the faculty member think about how to use it. In reality, that might mean remote power management instead of sending someone across campus to reboot a device. It could mean better voice processing for lecture capture, centralized management of wireless presentation systems, smarter camera switching, or something as wonderfully simple as making sure the HDMI cable never disappears from the room. The technology can be incredibly sophisticated underneath, but the experience should feel almost boringly predictable to the person using it. That is good AV. That only happens when all stakeholders have their voice heard.
There is also a business lesson in how these solutions get created. The strongest manufacturers I spoke with throughout the recordings were not at all leading conversations by telling customers what they should buy. Instead, they were asking what problems people were trying to solve. Integrators talked about understanding the institution before recommending the box. Our higher ed end users talked about needing partners they could trust when deploying hundreds of systems rather than one room at a time. That relationship becomes even more important at scale because a bad decision multiplied across two hundred classrooms is no longer a small mistake, is a resume invoking disaster. Listening is an essential part of the solution.
That is also why I continue to believe regional gatherings have an important place alongside our major industry shows. I love InfoComm and ISE, and they serve an enormous purpose for our industry. But there is something different about sitting across a table from the actual regional representative who may be supporting my, your, our campuses next month, meeting the technology manager from the university a few miles away, or discovering that another institution has already solved the problem keeping my team up at night. Those conversations create trust. They also allow manufacturers and integrators to hear directly from the people who live with these systems every day instead of trying to interpret customer needs through several layers of the channel. I mean, HETMA is at its core an advocacy organization, and there’s no better way to advocate and let them know what to deliver us than sitting across a table, breaking bread (or eating buffalo wings) and talking about our challenges and needs.
The more AV evolves, the more I think our competitive advantage as an industry is going to come from collaboration. Technology itself will keep getting easier to deploy. AI will automate more of it (but that’s a whole other article to write). Cloud platforms will make management more centralized. Products will continue becoming smarter, smaller, and more capable. That makes the human side of the business even more important because somebody still has to understand the problem, build the trust, bring the right people together, and decide what success actually looks like.
After spending the day in Buffalo, that may have been my biggest takeaway. We can debate products, architectures, platforms, and standards all day, and don’t get me wrong, we probably should. But the organizations that will move fastest and smoothest are going to be the ones where manufacturers, integrators, consultants, end users, faculty, IT teams, facilities teams, and leadership are willing to sit at the same table and solve problems together. The technology will change. The relationships are what make the technology work.
Take a listen to the live recordings that inspired this article:
Part 1: https://higheredav.com/363-live-from-the-hetma-roadshow-at-the-university-at-buffalo-part-1-higher-ed-av-podcast-with-joe-way/
Part 2: https://higheredav.com/364-live-from-the-hetma-roadshow-at-the-university-at-buffalo-part-2-higher-ed-av-podcast-with-joe-way/
Part 3: https://higheredav.com/365-live-from-the-hetma-roadshow-at-the-university-at-buffalo-part-3-higher-ed-av-podcast-with-joe-way/
Part 4: https://higheredav.com/366-live-from-the-hetma-roadshow-at-the-university-at-buffalo-part-4-higher-ed-av-podcast-with-joe-way/
