Can AV Managers Learn from their IT Counterparts?

A/V technology has rapidly changed over the past several years. The technical changes have been blazing fast and demands from our users grow at an almost equal pace. In the education world, A/V shops have transformed from staff who push around A/V carts to highly trained technicians, system designers and programmers. Despite these changes our basic charge has stayed the same, "provide the technology that I need and make sure it works when I need it". Many technology managers feel immense pressure to somehow manage all of this change, manage the exponential growth in equipment on our campuses and provide the same level of service that we did when we had more staff and less equipment. Bates College, for example, has experienced a 400% growth in A/V equipment and installations over the past 6 years, while losing one full time position. Unfortunately, many of the leaders of our institutions are unaware of how quickly A/V has evolved and still view the position in A/V departments as low skilled. At this critical point in the growth and importance of A/V in our institutions we can learn a tremendous amount from our colleagues in IT. After all, they went through, and continue to go through, similar changes with computing. Don't forget there was a time when the IT group was considered the "techies" whose only charge was to keep the computers working. Rightfully so, IT now has a role in almost all aspects of campus life.

At Bates College we have moved towards a model that borrows from the IT structure. Our first and most significant step towards this transition has been developing statistics on usage and problems. Talk to your IT guys, they can tell you how many e-mails come into campus on a day, how many help desk calls were made during a given time period, how many computers exist on the campus and they use this information to gain support for their work. At Bates, we are using Crestron RoomView for our reporting needs and the results have been phenomenal. Every month I am able to report detailed statistics to my staff, administration and faculty about A/V use on campus. Frankly, the usage blows us all away and makes us realize A/V is in constant use and is remarkably reliable. We currently have 50 classrooms on campus with full A/V installations. In those 50 rooms the A/V systems were used over 5,000 unique times in the fall semester of 2009. We had a total of 70 trouble calls during the first semester that were technical problems, resulting in a 98.9% success rate of technology in our classrooms. I don't want to lessen the importance and significance of the 15 problems, any time there is a problem it is serious, but I also use this data to point out to our administration the incredible job that is being done in keeping the equipment running. Compare this to what goes on in the IT side. If your CIO got 15 e-mails a month from people complaining about computing problems (and he/she probably does) they would simply chalk it up the fact that technology does not always work the way users expect it to, realizing that 15 calls is a pretty small number considering the usage of the network and computers. However, 15 e-mails to that same CIO about classroom technology problems would probably raise a "why does this stuff never work" response. If your CIO has this response, but has no frame of reference for the complaints, then what other reaction could be expected? You have to provide the data on a regular basis whether they ask for it or not. If done right, this data should be readily available for you to provide to your superiors without much of a time commitment on your part.

Another issue we grapple with on a regular basis is user support. For so long our mode of operation has been to drop everything, run to a problem and do anything you possibly can to fix the problem. I believe this can be traced back to the early days of classroom technology in which the equipment was a mix match of various technologies, much of which was custom built, and frankly, did not work consistently. Clearly, the technology has gotten to a level where this is not as much of a problem. Equipment is more reliable and many of our users are more comfortable with the equipment. However, there are still some problems that occur and training still needs to happen. Again, I suggest we look to IT to see what they have done that is successful and borrow what works. Most of us have borrowed the idea of a help desk from the IT side. I don't know of any institutions that don't have some form of an A/V help desk. How about classroom troubleshooting? What does a person do after hours when they can't get their laptop to work or there is no sound from the computer? Many institutions I have talked with either have no support for this type of situation, or they have paper printed and put in the classrooms. When was the last time you saw your IT department give a manual to a person when they delivered them a computer? They don't, instead they use the tools at their disposal, namely, helpsheets on the web. Use the same resource, or better yet, use the resource that may already be in the room, namely the touchpanel. In our classrooms, our touchpanels themselves are the troubleshooting tools. They tell the user whether the laptop is outputting a signal, and if not give the user the option of reading steps on how to ouput video from their laptop. Using current sensors we can detail some simple troubleshooting, such as whether the dedicated computer or the document camera is on, yes, we too get calls from people saying something didn't work only to find they had not turned it on. If someone presses the help button to report that there is no sound from the computer, the touchpanel shows instructions to check the volume on the computer, as well as the volume level on the touchpanel.

There has been a lot of talk on the A/V channels over the past few months about the digital transition and the host of problems that come with these changes. Particularly, how do we deal with super-high resolutions and connection types that are not standard in the classroom (i.e. HDMI, DisplayPort). While well intentioned, some people jump to conclusions like, let's have an emergency kit of every adapter type in every classroom. Again, that feeling of "we must make anything work" stirs in us. Yet, we know that we can not possibly achieve this goal and trying to will only result in more failure. A pile of adapters looks very messy, they will disappear and likely the users won't know how to use them. By making all these adapters available, you would be declaring support for all of them. We followed the lead of our IT department in this area as well. IT has a very clear list of software that is supported by the college. For example, we support Microsoft Word. If you choose to use Google Docs, Open Office or some other word processing application, the help desk will not support you. In the A/V group we published a list of supported input types (DVI, VGA, etc.) along with supported resolutions (XGA, WXGA). When someone brings a visitor to campus, we point them to this document and let them know what we support.

Finally, the last big thing we can learn from IT is about budgeting. This is a sensitive issue at the moment because everyone is getting their budgets slashed. However, I believe that IT does a very good job of letting people know exactly what it means to cut parts of their budget. Our network folks make very clear that cutting the preventative maintenance budget means they will not be able to replace switches and servers, and that it WILL result in more down time. Our desktop folks make it very clear that stretching out the desktop replacement cycle would mean that you end up with machines that are not under warranty, creating more work and costing more money. If the budgets in this area are cut, and there are failures, again, the network and desktop people do not "take the fall", and rightfully so, they point out that the failures are a direct result of budget cuts. Are we explaining very well what it means to skip a year on the replacement cycle for displays or control systems? Have you talked with your CIO about the change to digital interfaces that is well underway? Do they understand clearly that not replacing projectors and internal A/V system parts, that they will not be compatible with say, DVI or HDMI? Do you take it a step further and show them how this will affect faculty, staff and visiting presenters? If not, then it makes perfect sense that they cut your budget when the fiscal knife comes out. There are many resources available to provide you with data on the transition to digital. Use these resources to learn about these changes and talk with your superiors about why the equipment needs to be part of a regular replacement cycle. As technology managers, it is our responsibility to educate people in our organizations about the technical changes that have taken place in the industry and the correlation to change in job skills, responsibilities and fiscal support needed to provide reliable A/V on our campuses.

The IT guys did this years ago, now it is our turn.