I'll keep this short as my first post in XChange, but I'd love to hear what others think about this question! (and if there's a lot of interest, I'm happy to write more). 

Having started in AV contracting in the late 90s, I've always been interested in the integration nature of what we do - bringing together a variety of systems and devices to create an experience. The majority of those systems and devices were never intended to work together - and certainly weren't conceived with delivering that holistic experience in mind. But, that's ok, we had control systems and touch panels to help us hide the chaos of connections and create a coherent experience for our users. 

The fact is, we in AV learned faster and further than many of our related building systems peers because we got a lot of user feedback. Sure, it wasn't that kind or positive early on - "this system stinks", "it doesn't work", "it's too hard" and so on. But, we collectively learned from that and began to embrace the idea of a "user experience" (not just a user interface - or "GUI").

We also started trying to gather data from all the systems we were deploying via various server based management systems. And, we discovered that just because you can get data and plot a graph, doesn't mean it's valuable, or anyone will do anything with it. 

Fast forward to today, and most of the smart building industry is grappling with the challenges of user experience, robust systems integration and data acquisition. 

So, are those from an AV background well placed to thrive in this sector and help deliver great experiences, reliable performance and sustainable outcomes? 

What do you think?

Cheers

Pete