In higher education, we understand that our fiscal year runs July 1st to June 30th. As we enter the month of June, we are now crossing the finish line for the 2025/2026 school year. With this in mind, this month’s article is going to be a look back, and I am going to use my time machine for this to celebrate a win that has been a long time in the making.
As I looked to grow my higher ed connection, I stumbled across the AVTweeps community and #AVintheAM Sunday discussions. As I started to engage with the community, I realized I was among a select few who viewed AV as part of IT. I would use the hashtag #AVisIT and get a lot of comments that would disagree with that statement, with a few supporters.
One supporter of this thought was Joe Way and the Higher Ed AV Media group. Joe reached out asking if I would like to write a column with a focus on the IT side of AV. This was the start of the AV in IT articles. My first article came out around October 2022.
These articles, and the thinking that AV is IT, were ahead of their time, or at least an idea that the old guard did not want to accept. As we fast forward to today, June 2026, there are many members of the AV community who understand that we are part of IT.
I am hearing more and more members who are taking IT classes at school and IT training such as A+, Net+, Security+, etc. I am seeing members, like Dustin Myers, who even talked about IT within this discussion on AV (for example, check out Dustin’s May article). There are more and more InfoComm education sessions that focus on IT elements for AV (for the last three years, I have presented at least one session about IT elements in AV).
The last example I want to use is the AVIXA ANP certification. AVIXA coming out with a networking certification shows how the vertical requires knowledge of IT.
All of these changes are great and a movement in the right direction. With that said, we have not crossed the finish line. We have not gotten the checkered flag…YET. There is still more work to do.
One element that we need to see movement in is how we are saying the network is IT. IT stands for Information Technology, not networking only. When we limit IT to just the network, it is like limiting AV to just audio.
A good example of this is taking a look at your office computer. It’s the IT department that is imaging your computer, not the network team. In our world, this is like the AV programmer and the installer.
It’s the IT help desk who takes your call and might even come out and fix your computer, not a network engineer. In AV, this would be like our field techs when a truck is rolled out, not the audio engineer.
We wouldn’t limit AV to just audio or just video, so let’s not limit IT to just networking.
Another element we still need to work on is security. There has been movement in this, just not enough. There are still bad password management practices and a lack of understanding of the larger impact. I still see devices that require communication via telnet and other insecure methods.
There are folks who believe, “so what if a hacker gets onto the AV system? They will only impact the AV system.” This is not true.
Let’s look back at 2013 when Target’s POS was hacked. These hackers gained access to the POS system by coming through a vendor’s connection to Target’s HVAC system.
How many of our vendors have access to our system for “remote support” or “remote monitoring”? What would happen if someone took the same path as our vendor into our network? Could these bad actors move onto other systems? Would you even know if they did?
Yes, we can celebrate the win that the larger AV community is seeing that AV is IT, but I will say again that we have not gotten to the checkered flag yet. We cannot stop this movement and rest.
