A View NOT From The Road

Normally readers would look to this recurring blog for unique insights from annual industry conferences.  However, this year, there was no Enterprise Connect, there will be no InfoComm, and most of the other events where people would gather are also dead and gone.

As I write this we’re in a global, shelter in place situation responding to a pandemic so that we can “flatten the curve” as we’ve all been advised to do.

The news about illnesses and deaths is devastating.  Following closely behind it is the reality of the economic situation.  Schools and businesses have closed, projects have halted, and as I mentioned, conferences and live events have been cancelled.  No one has any idea when any of these things will even be allowed to attempt to get back to normal.  It is an unprecedented level of devastation that no one could ever have predicted.

Or could they have?

I remember my late father telling me many stories as a young child nearly six decades ago.  One of them was about the Ant and the Grasshopper.  During the beautiful spring and summer the grasshopper danced, sang, grabbed food to eat, and made fun of the ant who steadfastly worked at storing food and other necessities.  When winter came, and food was no longer readily available, the ant survived and the grasshopper didn’t. 

I and others in the AV and Collaboration industry have been talking about getting ready for the future for years.  We screamed things like AV is changing, that we need to embrace IT skills, that we need to provide loud warnings to our industry to pivot, etc.  I don’t think anyone imagined this specific pandemic (although, eerily, I did post a blog about precisely that subject in 2014 – see tinyurl.com/DantoPandemicWarning ) but we did warn about the M&A activities that were shrinking our industry and the other forces that were clearly going to impact what we do for a living.

And for the most part, the AV Industry organization ignored the warnings.  Instead of storing food for the coming winter, we boasted about the fantastic experiences only we can create.  Instead of moving closer to our IT brethren, we actively chose to distance ourselves from them – highlighting how much we could do that they couldn’t. 

Now we all find ourselves stuck in our homes.  Hundreds of thousands of newly remote knowledge workers desperately need advice and support about setting up their home network for collaboration, optimizing their personal audio and video, ensuring their set-ups are secure, and providing basic user instructions to novices.  And we in the AV industry are, for the most part, not positioned to be those champions.  What a tragically lost opportunity to have been that hero.  We actively chose to ignore the urgency to pivot to IT and now all our fantastic experiences are locked-down for the duration.  Who knows which firms will survive the lack of business that will ensue.  Wow, look at us indeed.

In addition, even if this pandemic hadn’t happened, other forces would have continued to shrink our industry.  The number 1 and number 3 ranked AV integrators just merged. The number 28 firm also just bought out the number 18 firm.  Can anyone in their right mind continue to boast about our industry’s future growth in light of these plain-as day facts?

In my opinion, it’s time for our industry leadership to stop pointing to the smoke and mirrors of how great we are and start giving the warnings and advice that they should have been all along. 

·         Tell integrators that coming up to speed on IT technologies is their number one priority if they don’t want some other predominantly IT organization to take their customers and eat them for lunch.

·         Tell users to embrace IT education, and learn about change control and other aspects of ITIL methodologies.

·         Focus most efforts on the growing parts of our industry – Collaboration, Digital Signage, Managed Services and support, etc.  Yes, hire and train experts in live event technology and large system integration, but understand that there are far fewer of those jobs to go around, and it should be – at best – a special interest group within the greater organization.

In addition to that, our industry organization needs to begin to advocate outside of our industry like other organizations do.  (The CTA is a great example of a group that does this successfully.)  What good is a certification that our members have to pay for that no one outside of our industry respects?  Who is speaking for our needs in the wireless spectrum world or with the signal transport groups (like HDMI?)

I pray everyone stays safe and healthy as we persevere through the current crisis, and that industry firms and members are able to get back up on their feet rapidly – and I of course will do my personal best to support any and all that I can.  I’m proud of the support The IMCCA has provided – with a pandemic support page containing educational materials and webinars as early as the third week of March – when most other organizations were still trying to figure out how to respond.  But despite my or anyone’s best efforts, I think the truth must still be acknowledged.

It’s clear that the time for change in AV is long past due.  It’s time to no longer believe the grasshoppers that say no one could have seen this coming.  Everyone should have seen it.  Shame on the people who were – and still are – blowing aspirational smoke up at us, and shame on us for listening to what we wanted to hear instead of what we needed to hear. 

Hopefully I can write the next “View From The Road” actually from the road, but I honestly can’t see that happening anytime this year (and CES 2021 ain’t looking all that good either.)  If you haven’t seen the signs and pivoted to IT and remote collaboration as your prime source of business yet, well – it was nice working with you back in the day.  I’ll think of you as fondly as I do Kindermann projectors and channel loading 16mm projectors, and 35mm slide dissolve units – just long dead relics of years gone by.

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This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions. David can be reached at DDanto@imcca.org and his full bio and other blogs and articles can be seen at Danto.info.