IT can roll out a unified communications platform while facilities hires an AV integrator for the conference rooms. If the two work queues never meet, the installed rooms may not support the selected platform.
This is what an AV silo looks like in practice.
How silos form
AV silos rarely result from bad decisions. AV has historically sat between IT, which owns networked technology, and facilities, which owns physical space. This ambiguity means:
Procurement happens in parallel. IT buys collaboration licenses. Facilities buys room equipment. The integrator sells whatever they're most comfortable installing. Nobody owns the intersection.
Standards don't exist. Without a single owner, there's no design standard. Every office, every floor, sometimes every room ends up with different equipment, different configurations, and different support models.
Knowledge is fragmented. The person who knows why Room 401 has a different codec than Room 402 left the company two years ago. Now it's tribal knowledge that nobody has.
Maintenance is reactive. When something breaks, someone fixes it. But there's no systematic tracking of failures, firmware versions, or end-of-life dates. You learn about problems from angry meeting organizers, not from monitoring dashboards.
What silos actually cost
The direct cost is duplicated spending. Different departments may buy overlapping capabilities or equip rooms with gear that does not support the primary collaboration platform.
But the indirect costs are worse:
Security exposure. Unmanaged AV endpoints are essentially unpatched computers sitting on your network. Many modern conference room systems run Android or Windows IoT under the hood. If they're not in your patch management system, they're a vulnerability.
Support burden. When every room is different, a "conference room doesn't work" ticket starts with discovery. The help desk must identify the equipment, configuration, owner, and vendor before it can diagnose the fault.
Adoption failure. If some rooms do not support the native collaboration experience, users bring HDMI cables and personal laptops or compete for the room that works. Those workarounds hide failures from the support queue.
The playbook
Dismantling silos requires organizational change backed by technical standards. Here's the sequence that works:
Step 1: Establish ownership. One person needs to own the AV environment. This person typically sits in IT and works with facilities. The owner creates and enforces standards, manages the lifecycle, and holds the room queue.
Step 2: Inventory everything. Every room, every device, every firmware version. Tag each room with a type classification (huddle, small conference, large boardroom, all-hands, etc.) and document what's installed versus what the standard should be.
Step 3: Define room standards. For each room type, create a design template. It should define the minimum configuration for a consistent, supportable experience on the primary collaboration platform. Include product models, firmware versions, and configuration settings.
Step 4: Prioritize the remediation. You're not going to fix everything at once. Prioritize by traffic (most-used rooms first), visibility (executive spaces), and risk (rooms with the oldest, most vulnerable equipment).
Step 5: Implement monitoring. Connect room monitoring to the existing ITSM tools. An offline room or overdue firmware update should generate a ticket before a user complains.
Step 6: Govern ongoing changes. New rooms, renovations, and equipment replacements all go through the standard. Document the justification and owner for each exception.
The quick win
If you do nothing else, do the inventory. You cannot make informed decisions about AV without knowing what you have. Record unauthorized equipment, unsupported firmware, unused devices, and rooms that do not match a standard.
Knowledge is the first step out of the silo.