How to Design and Deploy Meeting Room Technology Solutions That Actually Work for the Long Term
- 1 day ago
- 14 min read
Updated: 19 hours ago
Most organisations spend tens of thousands of pounds getting their meeting rooms kitted out, and within eighteen months half of them aren't being used properly. I've seen it happen more times than I can count, and I want to explain exactly why it keeps happening and what actually fixes it.
We're SPOR Group. We're a technology partner for workplace AV, and right now we manage over 1,500 meeting rooms and AV systems across the UK, Europe, and the USA. We work with organisations ranging from growing SMEs to large enterprise businesses, and across all of them, the problems that cause meeting room technology to fail are remarkably consistent. So is the solution.
This blog lays out both.
The Cost of Getting This Wrong
Before I get into the framework, I want to put some numbers on the table, because I think people significantly underestimate what poorly performing meeting room technology actually costs a business.
A study by Zetron found that IT downtime costs businesses an average of £4,200 per minute in lost productivity. AV failure in a meeting room isn't quite the same as a full IT outage, but when a client presentation falls apart because the screen won't connect, or a board meeting gets delayed because nobody can get the video call working, the cost is real and it adds up fast.
Research from Poly found that employees waste an average of 15 minutes per meeting dealing with technology issues. Across an organisation running fifty meetings a day, that's 750 minutes of productive time gone every single day. At an average UK professional salary, that works out to somewhere between £30,000 and £50,000 a year in wasted time, just from technology friction. That's before you factor in the harder to measure costs: the client that loses confidence in your organisation, the senior leader who quietly decides the meeting rooms aren't worth using, the IT team spending their time on avoidable support tickets instead of higher value work.
On the flip side, organisations that invest in proactive remote monitoring of their AV estate typically see support costs drop by 30 to 40 percent compared to reactive models. A Gartner study found that proactive monitoring reduces unplanned downtime by up to 70 percent. When you're managing a large estate across multiple sites, those numbers translate into a significant difference in both operational cost and user experience.
The point is this: the decision about how you deploy and manage your meeting room technology is not a technical decision. It's a financial one. And making it badly is expensive.
Why Meeting Room Technology Keeps Failing
Let me tell you a story that will probably sound familiar.
A company moves into a new office. They've got twelve meeting rooms across two floors, the workplace design is excellent, and leadership is proud of the space. The AV budget is healthy. They bring in a supplier, the install goes well, and on handover day everything works perfectly. The demo is clean. The IT manager nods. Sign off.
Six months later, Room 7 has a persistent audio issue that nobody's officially reported because people have just stopped using it. Room 3's booking panel is showing the wrong availability and has been doing so for weeks. Two of the Zoom Rooms haven't had a firmware update since installation and are starting to throw up compatibility warnings that nobody quite knows how to deal with.
A year in, a facilities manager finally does an informal audit and discovers that three of the twelve rooms have some form of ongoing issue, and two more are being underused because people don't feel confident using the technology. The organisation has paid for twelve rooms and is reliably getting the benefit of maybe seven or eight of them.
The cost of the install was around £180,000. The cost of the degraded performance over that first year, in wasted time, IT support tickets, and missed room utilisation?
Conservatively, more than the install itself.
Here's what I want you to take from that story: none of it was inevitable. Every single one of those problems was preventable. Not through luck, not through spending more, but through approaching the deployment differently from the start.
That different approach is what our DITAM framework is built around.
Introducing DITAM
DITAM stands for Design, Integrate, Training, Asset Management, and Monitoring. It's the framework we use at SPOR Group for every project we take on, regardless of size or budget. It covers the full lifecycle of meeting room technology, not just the installation, and that's what makes it different from the way most AV projects get approached.
Each element builds on the one before it. Skip one and you create a weak link that limits everything else. Work through them in order and you end up with technology that performs consistently for years, not months.
Let me take you through each one.
Design
Design is where the quality of your long-term outcome is largely determined, and it's the stage that gets rushed most often.
Good AV design is not about picking the best products from a catalogue. It's about understanding what each space needs to do before you decide what goes in it. That means properly mapping how each room will be used. How many people typically in the room? What's the likely split between in-person and remote participants? Is this a space for presentations, collaborative working, quick one-to-ones, or high-stakes board meetings? What are the acoustic conditions? What are the sight lines from every seat?
These questions aren't optional. The answers directly shape the right technology specification for each room, and getting the spec wrong is expensive to undo. A camera designed for a four-person huddle space in a thirty-person boardroom doesn't just underperform, it creates a bad experience for every remote participant in every meeting that room hosts.
Beyond individual rooms, good design also thinks about the estate as a whole. Standardisation across room types makes everything that comes later, training, support, upgrades, significantly simpler and cheaper. When every medium-sized meeting room in your estate has the same interface and the same core components, your people can walk into any of them and know how it works. Your IT team can support them all with the same knowledge base. Your refresh cycle becomes predictable rather than chaotic.
Industry research consistently shows that standardised AV estates cost between 20 and 35 percent less to support than mixed estates with multiple different systems and interfaces. That's a meaningful number if you're running a large estate.
The other thing good design gets right is future-proofing. Not predicting the future, which nobody can do, but making decisions now that don't lock you in unnecessarily. Open platforms over proprietary ones where possible. Infrastructure that gives you flexibility for the next refresh. Vendor choices based on development roadmaps and long-term support commitments, not just what's cheapest this year.
If you're currently in the planning phase of a move or refurbishment, we built our AV Bundle specifically to support this stage. It includes room configuration templates, a budget calculator, and a risk mapping tool that covers the most common specification mistakes we see. It's the fastest way to get your thinking properly organised before you start talking to suppliers. You can access it at spor-group.net/avbundle.
I talk about how to use our configurator tool in this video. Avoid costly mistakes like camera angles not picking people up, mics not being suitable for the room and displays not being the correct displays within 2 minutes using this configurator tool.
Integrate
If design is where outcomes are shaped, integration is where they're won or lost. It's also the area where the gap between what looks good on paper and what actually works day to day is widest.
Integration means making every component of your meeting room technology work seamlessly with every other component, and with the broader IT and workplace infrastructure around it. The video conferencing platform needs to talk properly to the room booking system. The booking system needs to reflect accurate availability. The hardware needs to connect reliably to the network. The network needs to be configured correctly for the kind of traffic AV systems generate, because getting this wrong is a common and frustrating cause of audio and video quality problems. The management layer needs visibility of all devices. The IT team needs to be able to support the system without calling the AV supplier every time something needs attention.
Every one of those connections is a potential failure point, and in our experience, most poorly performing AV estates have at least two or three of them that were never properly addressed during installation.
The problem is that integration is invisible when it's done well and only obvious when it's done badly. Which means it's easy for it to get deprioritised during a project when timelines are tight and the deadline for the office opening is coming up fast.
The consequences of cutting corners here show up in the weeks and months after handover. Intermittent connection issues that are hard to diagnose. Booking system conflicts that nobody can trace. Devices that fall off the network periodically for reasons that take hours to investigate each time. These aren't dramatic failures. They're the slow, steady erosion of confidence in the technology that turns a twelve-room estate into an eight-room estate in practice.
Proper integration takes time and it requires involving the right people, particularly the internal IT team, early in the process rather than presenting them with a finished system to inherit. It requires thorough testing across real use cases, not just a clean demo. And it requires documentation that genuinely describes how the system works, not just what's in it.
If you want a structured view of how well your current estate is integrated, and where the specific risk points are, our AV diagnostic report walks you through exactly that. You can find it at sporgroup.net/avreport.
Training
Training is the element that gets treated as optional most consistently, which is ironic because it's often the highest return on investment activity in the whole deployment.
Here's the reality. Meeting room technology has become significantly more capable over the last five years. One-touch join, wireless presentation, intelligent cameras that track speakers automatically, room booking integration that adjusts based on actual occupancy. All of it genuinely useful. All of it requiring the people in the room to know what they're doing to get the benefit of it.
Research from Logitech found that 86 percent of employees say they've experienced meeting technology that was too complicated to use confidently. When that happens, people don't persevere and learn. They find workarounds. They use their laptop instead of the room system. They book different rooms. They quietly develop a preference for the spaces they feel comfortable in and avoid the ones they don't.
The consequence of this is that organisations routinely underutilise significant portions of their AV investment. Rooms that cost £15,000 or £20,000 to fit out get used at 40 or 50 percent of their capacity because nobody felt confident enough in the technology to use it fully.
Effective user training doesn't need to be long. In most cases, a well-structured fifteen-minute onboarding session covers everything a user needs to feel confident in the core use cases. The key is that it's consistent, delivered to everyone rather than just whoever happened to be in the office on the day of the launch, and repeated for new starters as they join. One-off training events that happen on go-live day and never again are one of the most common mistakes we see.
Beyond end users, the IT team needs a different and deeper level of training. They need to understand how to diagnose common issues, how to make basic configuration changes, and when to escalate versus when to handle something internally. Well-trained internal support staff resolve issues faster, at lower cost, and with less disruption than a model that depends on external support for everything.
Asset Management
This is the element that most organisations are furthest from getting right, and the one where the gap between where they are and where they should be has the biggest operational impact.
Most organisations have limited visibility into their AV estate. They might have a spreadsheet that was accurate at the time of the last install. They might have procurement records that tell them what was purchased but not what's currently deployed, in what configuration, with what firmware version, against what warranty terms. What they almost never have is a live, accurate, centralised view of every device across their estate.
This creates problems at every level.
When something breaks, the time to diagnose and fix it is directly related to how much accurate information you have available. If your support team can immediately pull up the device model, firmware version, configuration, and maintenance history of the camera in Room 4, they can resolve the issue in a fraction of the time it takes when they're starting from scratch. Research from ServiceNow suggests that poor asset visibility adds an average of 45 minutes to IT incident resolution time. Across an estate of 1,500 rooms, that adds up to an enormous amount of wasted support time every year.
When you're planning a refresh or an upgrade, accurate asset data tells you exactly what you have, what's approaching end of warranty, what's underperforming, and where to prioritise investment. Without it, you're making those decisions based on guesswork and whoever shouts loudest, which is not a sensible basis for capital planning.
When you're managing costs, asset visibility lets you identify maintenance contracts you're paying for on equipment you no longer have, warranty claims you should be making but aren't, and refresh cycles that could be planned efficiently rather than reactively.
This is precisely the problem that SPORTrack was built to solve. SPORTrack is our AV asset management platform that gives you a centralised, live view of your entire estate across all your locations. Every device. Every warranty. Every maintenance record. Usage analytics that show you which rooms are performing and which aren't. It's the layer that turns your AV investment from a black box into something you can actually manage with intelligence and confidence.
If you want to see how it works in practice, we run live demonstrations. You can book one at spor-group.net/sportrackdemo. If you're managing AV across more than one site, I'd strongly recommend spending an hour on it.
Monitoring
Proactive remote monitoring is the element of the framework that most directly addresses the degradation story I told at the start of this blog. It's also the area where the financial case is most straightforward to make.
The traditional model of AV support is reactive. Something breaks. Someone notices, usually during a meeting when it matters most. A ticket gets raised. Someone investigates. A fix gets scheduled. By the time the room is working again, the problem has typically been affecting users for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. The damage to confidence in the technology compounds with every incident.
Proactive remote monitoring operates on a completely different model. Instead of waiting for something to fail and someone to notice, you're continuously watching the health of your AV estate and addressing issues before they affect users.
In practical terms this means: detecting when a device goes offline unexpectedly and investigating before that room is booked for anything important. Identifying when audio or video quality metrics start to degrade before users start complaining. Flagging when firmware updates are overdue and pushing them before they cause compatibility issues. Catching early warning signs of hardware failure before the failure happens.
The operational difference is significant. Organisations that move from reactive to proactive AV management typically see the number of user-reported incidents drop by 50 to 60 percent, according to data from Frost and Sullivan's research on managed AV services. Support costs fall by 30 to 40 percent. Unplanned downtime, which is the most expensive category of AV failure, reduces by up to 70 percent.
For an organisation managing a large, multi-site AV estate, the financial case is clear. The cost of proactive monitoring is substantially lower than the cost of the reactive support it replaces, and that's before you account for the productivity losses from downtime or the harder to quantify cost of eroded confidence in your technology.
Remote monitoring also changes what's possible in terms of support coverage. When your support team, or our team on your behalf, can see every device across your estate from a single dashboard and diagnose most issues without sending an engineer on site, you're delivering faster resolution at lower cost regardless of where the issue occurs. For organisations with multiple locations across different geographies, this is particularly valuable. The alternative is either having dedicated AV support staff at every location, which is expensive, or accepting that remote sites get slower, worse support, which is damaging.
SPORTrack's monitoring capability integrates directly with the asset management layer, so when an alert fires, the support team immediately has access to the full device history, configuration, and warranty information they need to act on it quickly. The two functions together are considerably more powerful than either one in isolation.
Why You Can't Skip Steps
I want to be direct about this because it's the part that's easiest to talk yourself out of when a project is under time or budget pressure.
DITAM is not a menu. Every element is there for a reason and removing any one of them creates a weakness that limits everything else.
Good monitoring depends on good asset management. If you don't have an accurate, live record of what you have in your estate, monitoring is incomplete and alerts lack the context needed to act on them efficiently.
Good asset management depends on proper integration. If your systems don't talk to each other cleanly, your asset data has gaps. Devices fall off the record. Configurations drift from what was documented. The picture becomes unreliable.
Good integration depends on good design. If the specification was wrong to begin with, integration is working against a flawed foundation. You can integrate a badly designed system well and it will still underperform.
Training runs through all of it, because the best designed, best integrated, best monitored AV estate still only delivers its full value when the people using it and supporting it know how to get the most out of it.
We see organisations try to solve performance problems by adding monitoring onto a poorly integrated estate, or by refreshing hardware without addressing the training gap, or by investing in asset management without having done the design work properly. In almost every case, the improvement is real but limited. The weak link constrains the whole chain.
This is why when we engage with a new client, we always start with an honest assessment of where they currently sit against each element of the framework. Sometimes we find that the design and integration work is solid and what they actually need is better asset management and monitoring. Sometimes we go back to basics on the design. The starting point depends on where they are. The direction of travel is always the same.
The Numbers That Matter
Let me bring some of the key figures together, because I think it's useful to have them in one place.
Organisations with poorly managed AV estates waste an average of 15 minutes per meeting on technology issues. Across a medium-sized organisation running 50 meetings a day, that's over 180 hours of productive time lost every week. At average UK professional salary levels, that's somewhere in the region of £40,000 to £60,000 a year, every year, in friction that shouldn't exist.
Reactive AV support models cost between 30 and 40 percent more to operate than proactive managed models, when you account for the full cost of incidents including engineer call-outs, lost productivity, and repeat failures.
Standardised AV estates cost 20 to 35 percent less to support than mixed estates, and have significantly higher room utilisation rates because people are confident using them.
Proactive monitoring reduces unplanned AV downtime by up to 70 percent and reduces user-reported incidents by 50 to 60 percent.
Poor asset visibility adds an average of 45 minutes to IT incident resolution time per ticket.
None of these numbers are theoretical. They represent the difference between organisations that treat their AV estate as a product purchase and organisations that treat it as an ongoing managed service. The gap in outcomes is significant and it compounds over time.
If You're Planning Something Right Now
If you're in the middle of planning an office move, a refurbishment, or a significant AV upgrade, the planning phase is the highest leverage point. Decisions made now will shape the performance of your meeting rooms for the next five to ten years. Getting the framework right from the start is considerably less expensive than retrofitting it later.
Our AV Bundle is built specifically for this stage. It gives you room configuration templates, a budget calculator, a risk mapping tool, and a structured approach to technology selection that maps directly to the DITAM framework. It's the fastest way to get properly organised before supplier conversations start and commitments get made.
Access it at spor-group.net/avbundle.
If you're not planning something new but your current estate isn't performing the way it should, the right starting point is an honest diagnostic. Our AV report at sporgroup.net/avreport gives you a structured view of where your estate currently sits across each element of the framework and where the gaps are.
And if you want to see SPORTrack in action as the asset management and monitoring layer, book a demo at spor-group.net/sportrackdemo. It's an hour well spent if you're managing AV across more than one location.
What Comes Next
This blog is the overview. Over the coming weeks I'm going to publish a dedicated piece on each element of DITAM, going deeper into the practical detail of how to get it right, what the most common mistakes look like, and what good actually looks like in practice. If this has been useful, those follow-ups will give you considerably more to work with at each stage.
The bottom line is straightforward. Meeting room technology that works consistently over the long term is not the result of buying better products. It's the result of a better approach. Design it properly. Integrate it thoroughly. Train the people who use it and support it. Manage your assets with proper visibility. Monitor proactively rather than reacting to failures.
Do those five things in order and you end up with an estate that delivers on its investment for years. Skip any of them and you end up back in the story I told at the start of this blog, paying twice for a result that should have been right the first time.
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