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The Four S’s Are Your Keys to Collaboration Success

AV Everywhere

You want your workplace to be more than a building where people are obliged to meet for at least eight hours a day. It should be a home where teams can share and build upon ideas that help your company grow. To create the spaces that inspire your workers, AVI-SPL follows the “four S’s”: simple, standardized, scalable and serviceable. Each of these guidelines work together to form the workspaces that help meet your organization’s desired outcomes. Below, we look at what each of these principles means, why they matter, and how they work together.

Simple, Standardized, Scalable, and Serviceable

Simple — Are you going to use a conference room where the technology is an obstacle course of complexity, unreliability, and frustration? If you’re inclined to use a collaboration space, you want to work with colleagues on a project, not wonder why you can’t get the interactive display to sync to your device.

To apply simplicity to a space doesn’t mean you’ve limited its capabilities. Rather, you’ve removed the complex barriers to using and benefiting from those capabilities. This is usually the meaning when you hear someone describe a technology system as “frictionless.” Starting a meeting is streamlined, so that you can quickly start the display, audio, video, presentation, and get the purpose of the meeting underway.

Standardized — Regardless of where you’re working from, the technology experience needs to be the same among similar rooms in all locations. An employee that knows how to use a collaboration room in his or her home office should be able to do the same in another regional office. Applying standards and best practices makes the experience simple for the end user. Some of our clients have room standards that AVI-SPL must deliver reliably and in a way that allows their organizations to grow.

If you’ve yet to settle upon standards, AVI-SPL can help develop and provide them through its Rapid Rooms and Smart Spaces. These are collaboration spaces of various types that have been preconfigured with essential collaboration tools for various group sizes.

Your regional requirements may mean substituting one solution for another based on product availability. AVI-SPL lets customers know how their budgets may fluctuate based on those regional preferences. Because we are aware of differences within the same company, our designers, programmers and integrators ensure that your room functionality is consistent across locations.

Scalable — A scalable set of solutions are easily repeatable from office to office. By keeping room solutions simple and standardized, we can quickly deploy your rooms so that your regional locations stay connected. As your company grows and adds more collaboration spaces and solutions, so does AVI-SPL’s support of those solutions and your user experience through our managed services.

Serviceable — AVI-SPL considers serviceability as a design element when developing standards for your rooms and technology systems. That’s because spaces that are easy to use should also be easy to support. We assess the network topology where the solutions are being deployed so that the IT stakeholders can deliver and support the solutions on a consistent basis.

Serviceability means IT and/or  your managed services provider can proactively resolve issues and acquire the analytics that provide business insights, like how often your collaboration spaces are being used, the quality of the experience, and the number of service tickets that were generated in a particular time frame. From the data analysis of those standardized rooms, your organization continues to adjust its standards and conference rooms, and improve the user experience.

We find that customers are demanding actionable business intelligence about their collaboration solutions. They want to know if their technology systems are delivering ROI by improving productivity and if they need to reconfigure their collaboration spaces. AVI-SPL’s Symphony managed services platform provides the analytics to let you know whether your systems are delivering their intended value.

Work With the Experts in the Collaborative Workplace Experience

By following the four S’s, AVI-SPL creates meaningful spaces and better workplace experiences. Contact AVI-SPL and let us know where we can help improve the business outcomes for your organization.  

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How Higher Education Can Make the Most of Its Current Tech Assets

AV in Education

JLL, a prominent real estate service provider, notes that higher education is facing the largest demand for capital investments they’ve ever seen. By upgrading their facilities, schools can recruit students to innovative programs that support teaching and learning in exciting and engaging ways. However, universities are also feeling the pressure from reductions in federal aid, due to defaults on school loans. JLL states that 40 percent of student loan borrowers are expected to default on their loans by 2030, which is a data point used for federal aid qualification.

So the challenge for schools is this: how to approach its building projects in a cost-effective way as they deal with the pressures of losing the support of student loans.

Gain Business Intelligence

Once a higher ed school upgrades or builds a facility, reductions in cost can be achieved with the right technology platform in place. A platform, like AVI-SPL Symphony, can bring tactical and strategic business intelligence to these institutions. Let’s look at a pre and post platform deployment example.

Pre – No Actionable Business Intelligence: A building has 100 rooms with 450 technology devices, ranging from video conferencing to projectors to displays and everything in between, all from a multitude of manufacturers. A teacher, who needs to use the equipment in one of the rooms, discovers the systems don’t work. She makes do without them, runs her class, and may or may not reach out to IT. Because the solutions didn’t work, she stops using that room or technology. IT eventually finds out about the problem, sends out a technician, fixes the issue and moves on to the next issue.

Post – Tactical Business Intelligence: This same building’s rooms and devices are loaded onto a managed services platform like AVI-SPL Symphony. Let’s say there is an issue with technology, from anywhere in that building. Through auto-detection, thresholds and ticket creation, IT can proactively resolve this issue before it affects the teachers and students. When issues cannot be resolved quickly, IT can inform the teachers, who can then move their classes and minimize disruption.

Post – Strategic Business Intelligence: As device data is collected through the monitoring and management platform, schools can analyze what is happening within their spaces, including which ones are being used and why, which technologies are generating the most tickets, and what are the root causes of those tickets. This enables data-backed decisions to be made on how to repurpose and upgrade those areas.

“Rather than turning to new construction to accommodate academic needs, colleges and universities continue to make better use of the facilities they already have,” says David Houck, co-leader of JLL’s Higher Education practice. “Campus utilization studies, occupancy planning tools and centralized management of shared spaces can unlock significant efficiency and savings opportunities.”

Work with AVI-SPL to learn more about Symphony and how it can do for your university what it’s doing for Australia’s RMIT:

 

 

To view our Partner blog, click here