By Ryan Gray
It’s the end of AV as we know it, and I feel fine.
So here’s the question, do we define a community by who it includes? Or who it excludes? Am I, are you, are we, more interested in those with whom we are most alike? Or are we looking to find others who we didn’t know we shared something in common with? Those are pretty broad questions and I’m happy to give my answers… for me, it’s both.
My introverted side finds comfort in the familiarity of family, friends, co-workers, etc. That includes being at events like the ETC conference or HETMA events, there’s value in being with “my people” those who are struggling with the same things I am.
However, the most rewarding experiences are often when I find someone new to add to my community. This past December, after the standard college “winter celebration” event, there was a student Jazz band playing as volunteers cleaned up the event room. I was listening when I noticed a colleague, someone from a different area of IT that I hadn’t talked with much, sitting at a table across the room doing the same… Ninety minutes later the band was gone, and the room was all cleaned up, but we were still there talking. We learned about each other, found new things we could work on together, and found some common frustrations that we could bond over.
My hope is that many of you may meet this person this year as we discussed topics we could possibly present together at AV conferences this Fall.
This colleague’s title and role mark them as clearly an IT person. So I wonder, would some of us wonder why they were attending an AV conference? This brings me back to the opening question:
Do we define our community by who we exclude or who we include?
I think this is a key question as we consider my main prediction for 2023. This will be the year that not only marks the end of the “is AV IT” debate, but this is the year that will mark the indisputable beginning of the information intelligence AV era… and it will be a good one for our users.
The end of AV
This month, on this very platform, my friend James King contemplated “Killing AV as We Know It”. The AV Superfriends discussed at length the “Death of AV”. A few weeks ago on a call with a manufacturer, they were demonstrating some of the automation and intelligence built into their devices for conference room use. As they shared their roadmap for future improvements, they said, “we see this as the end of AV integration”.
Many of these conversations center around the growing “out of the box” automation and intelligence built into a myriad of AV devices. There are auto-tracking cameras of every flavor, beamforming mics that can pick an individual’s voice out of thin air, and DSP’s claiming they can perfectly “auto-tune” a room, with no human intervention needed. While the products that claim these types of capabilities vary widely in how well they do it, the future is clear. More and more of what we have been doing will be done by algorithms and lines of code.
That’s scary… but we only need to be scared of it if we limit what we can do to the paradigm of what we have done.
Will we define what AV is by what we exclude from the discipline or will we seek to find commonalities with other disciplines?
On this month’s AV SuperFriends On Topic, Chris Dechter mentioned that his AV department has more managed switches than the networking group and they manage more PCs than the endpoint management group.
We’re already embracing IT.
We in AV are now using words like “multicast” with the precision of knowledge. We’re fluent in network protocols, we serve as system administrators for server-based software and cloud management platforms. We develop and uphold security protocols for our systems. We are IT professionals. We do these things for one main reason… they help us produce better experiences for our users. Traditional AV folks make great IT professionals… we’re already doing the job and we understand why we do it.
It’s time for the AV takeover of IT
In his article this month, James King references some comments I made during the monthly AV Happy Hour. That includes something along the lines of, “it’s time for the AV takeover of IT”. So I’ll say it, it’s time for the AV takeover of IT.
Let me explain what I mean… first, this isn’t a hostile takeover. We’re not storming the walls or anything, but we’re not agreeing to stay in our lane either. It’s time to stop saying things like “at my institution AV falls under IT”.
It’s time to let go of the little brother mentality, embrace our role in IT, and pull up our seats at the table.
Let’s find common ground, find allies, and seek out those who work every day with a student-first focus regardless of specialty. Let’s find ways we can not just be part of IT, let’s find ways we can lead IT.
If some of our work is going to be done by lines of code, by algorithm, by machine learning, or by AI… fine, that’s great. First, it’ll still be our job to make sure that work is done well and is producing great experiences for our users. But second… What else will that free us up to do? If we are tech professionals, let’s embrace the advancement of technology, guide its implementation in our institutions and increase our attention and participation in the full array of technology tools that IT is bringing to bear for the purpose of learning.
The AV takeover of IT means embracing the future, instead of fearing it.
Letting go of the paradigm of staying in our lane. It means redefining how we define our community, not by who we exclude but by looking for all those we should include. It means applying our knowledge, our caring, and our principles to a wider and wider range of technology and a wider range of people. It means seeking leadership opportunities and finding ways to bring other IT specialties into our departments. It means choosing positions at institutions that see AV as an integral part of IT and avoiding those that don’t. The AV community has a ton to offer the wider IT community, especially in higher education… So let’s go see what we can do.
We’ll look back on 2023 as the year that the paradigm of AV changed, the question is how will we respond? Let others define what we do or make our own choice to expand what we do.
The year 2023 starts the watch for a university CIO to rise to that position from an AV background. Who out there wants to be the first?