RA. Blog: Technical Thoughts from the AV/UC World

AV & IT in the Enterprise — Post 1 of 6

Picture the scene. A new office opens. Leadership walks through the space with an architect’s render in hand, pointing at clean glass walls and nodding at the ceiling-mounted speakers. “The AV is sorted,” someone says. The integrator has been paid. The ribbon is cut. The helpdesk ticket is already waiting.

This is where most Enterprise AV stories begin. And most Enterprise AV disasters are born.

“How hard can screens on walls be?” is the most expensive question in facilities management.

The problem is not technology. The screens work fine on day one. The cameras connect. The codecs handshake. The problem is ownership, or rather the complete absence of it.

In most organisations, audiovisual infrastructure falls into a gap between departments who each believe, with complete sincerity, that someone else is responsible for it.

Facilities: “We spec’d the room. AV was in the fit-out.”
Procurement: “Signed off on the SOW. Job done.”
IT: “That’s not on our estate. It’s a building system.”
Project Management: “We delivered on time, and on budget.”
The Business: “We just need the room to work on Monday.”

Five departments. Zero owners.

The Support Reality

When a meeting room fails at 8:47am, the call goes to a helpdesk agent with no visibility into the AV system, no access to the management platform, and no escalation path that does not involve a three-day SLA with an integrator two counties away. The exec in the room does not care about the org chart. They care that the board call starts in four minutes.

AV has always been treated as furniture. You buy it, you install it, and then you expect it to just exist, like a desk or a partition wall. The integrator hands over a system designed for day one, not for day three hundred and forty seven, when the firmware has not been patched, the room booking system has changed twice, and the codec is running an end-of-life software version nobody knew about.

Then IT arrives. Usually late. Usually because something broke.

By the time IT is meaningfully involved in Enterprise AV, the estate is already sprawling. Different vendors across different sites, no unified management, no standardised configuration, and a support model written for a world where “AV” meant a projector in a boardroom used twice a quarter.

Modern AV is IT. It runs on your network. It holds your meetings. It processes your video. Treating it otherwise is a choice, and it is a choice with consequences.

Those consequences are not abstract. They arrive in three forms, and all of them are expensive.

Reputational

The board call that drops. The client pitch where the laptop will not connect. The all-hands where the remote offices cannot hear. Every failure is visible, and in a world of hybrid work, every meeting room is a public stage.

Operational

Shadow IT workarounds multiply. People stop booking certain rooms. Meetings start late as a default. Productivity loss becomes normalised and invisible, because nobody is measuring it against the Enterprise AV estate that caused it.

Financial

Emergency call-out fees. Repeated site visits for problems that remote management could have resolved. Parallel support contracts from IT and the integrator, neither of whom covers the gap. Refresh cycles driven by frustration, not lifecycle planning.

None of this is inevitable. But none of it gets fixed until someone in the organisation is willing to say a sentence that currently has no owner:

AV is our problem, and we are going to manage it like one.

The gap between AV and IT is not a technology problem. It is not a procurement problem. It is a governance problem, and governance problems do not solve themselves. They compound.

The rest of this series is about how to close that gap. But before you can close it, you have to be willing to look at it clearly.

So look. Really look. Count the rooms in your estate where you do not know who is responsible if something fails tomorrow morning. Count the meeting spaces where the support path ends with “call the integrator.” Count the sites where IT cannot see the AV devices on the network because nobody ever told them they were there.

That number, whatever it is, is your exposure.

Next: How hard can screens on walls be?