This month’s theme focuses on advancements and how to take things to the next level. When it comes to technology, there are a few areas we should focus on taking to the next level. The areas I am going to talk about in this article are hardware, software, and training.
Hardware
Looking at Moore’s Law, we can expect hardware power and capability to double roughly every two years. With this information and knowing the pace of higher education purchasing, we can expect that our classrooms’ technology will be behind the game before we are done with the installation.
This then means that we need to be advocating for resources to make sure our classrooms’ technology is advancing. There is no way that we can upgrade all classrooms at the same time.
This means we need to develop a life cycle plan. Our life cycle plan should outline which rooms are slated for an upgrade, a budget idea on the cost of updating those rooms, as well as which equipment does not need to be upgraded. Once we have our life cycle planned out, we need to keep it moving forward. A need to skip or a change in the budget can have dramatic effects on the whole plan, taking our already behind classrooms further behind.
Software
Just like hardware, software technology is always advancing. Addressing the changes in software has its pros and cons over hardware.
One pro to software is the upgrades can be applied quicker and are easier to scale. For example, if an update comes out, we will just need to download that update and then push it out to the areas it is installed. This process can be quick and low impact, as we would not need to take a room offline for multiple days. With the world moving to cloud platforms, software updates are even quicker and can be handled by the company, which frees up our small team to handle other issues.
One con to software upgrades is all the validation we need to do before we can roll it out. For example, if there is an update to the software, we will need to have that software reviewed not just by our team but also other teams like security, mainly if the software is a cloud platform.
Does the update auto-enable an option that is not covered under a BAA? Is there a bug in the software that can impact all spaces? Did the company remove a feature that your users used heavily? Does the upgrade change the licensing agreement? These are just some other considerations we need to keep in mind when we upgrade software.
Training
Hardware and software are products that our users use and that our teams need to support. To provide the high level of support our users expect requires our team members to have training. This is when we need to advocate for our team to make sure they are getting the training they need. This does not just mean surface level training on the new hardware/software but also other skills like customer service skills or even skills that might be outside of AV, like networking and security.
We should be making sure that we have professional development funds that we can have members of our teams use. These funds can be used to send them to trade shows or other trainings. We also need to network with our contacts at manufacturers to provide targeted training.
The last element that we need to keep in mind is that not only do we need money, but we also need to allocate time for our team members to take the training. It should not be expected that training will be done during off hours. Daily operations do not stop, but we also need to provide room for our team to take their training.
