But yet, somehow, there is a greater malaise that casts a shadow over your audio-visual and interactive technology systems. Often, this stuff does not work as you and your team assumed it would. It’s frustrating and irritating to use, so people don’t use it. Instead of increasing efficiency, it becomes a burden. How did this happen?
It’s a common problem for schools, corporations and organizations. In the spirit of improvement, I offer the following:
- Honesty: Admit that you have a buying problem. (Usually this can happen only if you already have spent large sums of money on custom AV, only to end up with semi-operational systems that don’t do what you thought they would, and that nobody uses.)
- Faith: Know there is a better way, and a wealth of experts (an entire industry, in fact) available to restore effective AV procurement.
- Surrender to the process. Make a decision to engage your entire team and hold them accountable.
- Soul-Searching: Take an honest, brutal account of your AV enterprise planning successes and failures.
- Integrity: Admit you’ve been wasting money and time and that this can be done better. (It could be cultural, procedural, silos, turf wars, etc., but get real about the road blocks and disconnects in your procurement process, and acknowledge them as a team.)
- Acceptance: Prepare for the culture change necessary to remove the deficiencies that have prevented successful AV procurement.
- Instill humility in the team culture and humbly seek out assistance and partnerships that will help remove the shortcomings. Know your strengths, and play your position.
- Willingness: Be open to engaging all persons who have been professionally or personally frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the current AV systems. The bigger the complaint, the better this step.
- Seek Forgiveness: Make amends to the above stakeholders through engagement in the process. Through accountability, remove their complaints now and in the future.
- Maintenance: Continue to improve the plan and system design based on the concession that things can, and likely will, change.
- Make Contact: Partner with experts. Concede that AV is not IT, and that’s okay. You can have best-in-class experts guiding your IT infrastructure and desktop management initiatives, but that is no guarantee they’ll be effective in managing AV systems.
- Service: Commit to carry this message to the technically uninitiated throughout your organization, and practice these principals in all of your organizational affairs.
