Text:/ Paul van der Ent

TRUST YOUR CLIENT

Kicking off Day Two was keynote presenter David Nour, CEO of the Nour Group, Inc., whose presentation Adaptive Innovation – Adaptable Business Models for Changing Market Demands, focussed on the basics of relationship building. This echoed some of the previous day’s presentations but concentrated on understanding our clients and their businesses. His presentation covered topics as diverse as social media and cloud computing, but boiled down to a single recurring question: “Why is it in every other culture in the world, we build relationships before we enter into business with a person or company, but in the US, if and only if we enter into business and it is successful, do we decide to build a relationship?” I thought these were powerful words, as we have the same issues here in this part of the world. We too, need to lift our game and have trust between us and the customer.

The informal chat after this session and on the previous day with other attendees – some of whom were end users and consultants – showed me that these problems are indeed global. As Mark Valenti later put it in his blog, “If we don’t understand our client’s business, we won’t earn the trust needed for a collaborative relationship”. If we don’t all work to change this perception, how are we ever going to get into a project in the early stages and be considered as part of the original design?

IT: EMBRACE THE BEAST

Kit Lisle and Julia Baillie from Acclaro Growth Partners presented the next session. These guys have been responsible for a number of the surveys undertaken by InfoComm since 2004. Drawing on this research we were told that IT believes the convergence with AV is taking place at a faster rate than most AV professionals are prepared to believe. It looks at AV and says we should think of ourselves as part of the IT industry, and as we can’t escape this, we must embrace it. One of the biggest impacts of this convergence is that AV is following in the footsteps of IT in becoming a commodity where hardware margins are now in the low single digits. The silence throughout the whole room was palpable.

To compensate for these low product margins companies need to make a blended margin. Like the IT sector our labour rates need to rise to meet the cost of the education, training, qualifications and standards we will need to have to deal with convergence.

Their research indicates that by 2016 AV and IT will be fully converged, and that both industries would become critical components of a smart building industry. It is expected to see further convergence between AV, IT, security, acoustics, lighting, HVAC systems, communications and structured cabling. They also identified that AV design is becoming more of a commodity, and design consultants will have to add high value services to increase margins and revenue in this new converged era. They also saw the AV design consultant as being ahead of the AV integrator in accepting convergence, a statement that provoked some heated comment.

COMPETITION OR COOPERATION?

Dale Johnson from Technology Assurance Group led us through the next session: Cooperate, Compete, Coordinate. As an example of how AV/IT convergence might take place, Johnson referred us to the data and voice communication industries converging over the structured cabling system, and voice becoming software based. While he admitted that AV was a lot harder to converge than data and voice, he said we basically have three choices: Cooperate/partner with IT; compete by scaling up our AV businesses to have IT as part of our services offering; or coordinate between AV and IT providers. There is a fourth alternative, and that is do nothing, but as Johnson put it, “Inaction often brings unintended results”. He spoke about these alternatives in depth but came to the conclusion that subcontracting – either AV to others or others under AV – was not a workable solution.

The final session was a Q&A panel of three business consultants: Tom Stimpson from the Stimpson Group, Kit Lisle from Acclaro Growth Partners and Bill Sharer from Exxel Management and Marketing. They reaffirmed a number of often-repeated statements from all these discussions which I’ve summarised in a sidebar.

TAKE HOME MESSAGE

I left the conference feeling cautiously upbeat. My networking was intense, and there was a lot of discussion out in the foyers and at dinners and lunches about convergence, contracting, builders, construction, design and construct, and tender bidding. I spoke with a wide variety of AV industry participants, people from large universities, a specialised programming company employing over 40 programmers, and business owners from South Africa, the Middle East, India, UK, and USA and Canada. The one thing I learnt was that we all have the same issues. We may not entirely agree about the loss of true AV knowledge that the forthcoming convergence may bring, but we all agreed that we need to get ready for it, because like it or not, it is happening now.

As Daniel Burrus said in his keynote, “The future is changing”. Connection, communication, collaboration and engagement are all being redefined right now, and we, the AV Industry, need to be at the forefront of this process. It just might be time for Australia to have its own AV summit.