INTERVIEW: RANDY LEMKE, INFOCOMM INTERNATIONAL
Randy Lemke – a brief biography
Dr Randal A Lemke, PhD retires at the end of December after 16 years with InfoComm. He became executive director and CEO of the organisation in 2000
Immediately prior to joining InfoComm, he held the position of director of the Extended Learning Institute at Northern Virginia Community College for seven years
He spent a year as training director at the National Crime Prevention Council
In the 1980s, he held assistant professorships at the University of Virginia and Gallaudet University
produce the revenue to do the sorts of things that an association should be doing for its members. As an organisation our international budget, if you look at North America versus the rest of the world, it’s almost half and half now. So financially we’ve moved around the world in a way that we weren’t 12 years ago. We have a tradeshow in Asia, we participated in Photokina as a licensee, and now with ISE in particular in Europe, and in Russia with ISR, and here in Dubai, we’ve been able to run
a series of tradeshows. They’re the forward outposts, they’re a rallying point. When we’re here it’s a place where members get together. So these little events are places where membership starts to form and grow. And it’s a great thing, it’s one of the things that we’re proud of being able to do. In a for-profit company you distribute profits; we can’t distribute profits but we distribute benefits. We want to work with
platforms that are world class. That’s why we went to an ANSI-ISO certification
programme: instead of saying ‘We’re the best, we’re our own little body’, having an ISO accreditation has put a lot of stiffness in the argument. Incidentally, on our board it was Brian Pipe [of Arup] who put together how we could do a standards programme that didn’t tell manufacturers how to build products. Brian said, let’s just look at how well our systems work and perform. If we can get everybody to have systems that perform well, no matter what the equipment is, then we will have helped everybody in the industry. So those kinds of contributions are really important, and I’m personally pretty proud that they got started on my watch.
You mentioned tradeshows as forward outposts – do you
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think that that model will always hold true, with an increasing use of the internet, virtual tradeshows and so on? I think that what started in the Middle Ages is probably going to continue! We always say that tradeshows have three components. One is, of course, product. But there’s also education, and that’s why we worked to have the strong education programme that we now have at ISE. And the third part is networking. Having people in the same spaces together, and seeing so many people and so many products so quickly, is not yet replicable with an electronic model. Maybe at some point it will be, but the typical virtual tradeshow hasn’t been it at all. In the US, they’re practically gone. Even Google really believes in having people in a room talking to each other, working together.
What about the collaborative technologies that we see increasingly these days? You know, people ask me about videoconferencing and collaborative technology. I think that at some point in a business relationship they are the perfect tool – but they’re hardly ever the perfect tool when you start. If you and I were going to work together for the first time, I’d want to be here with you – it’s that face- to-face relationship. Once we have a deal, once we have that relationship, then working virtually and collaboratively is
fantastic, because you’ve got that human side of the equation already working.
Finally, what do you think has been the most disruptive technology – the one that’s made the biggest change to our lives?
The internet has really been a great change. When I was a professor, when we used the internet, it was a collection of shared resources among universities. It was line driven, command driven, more akin to FTP sites than anything else. The browser changed that
dramatically: I think we’ve gone from an internet of resources, then the browser gave us an internet of people, and what’s going on now is an internet of devices. There are probably more IP addresses for devices than there are for people. If you think of all these AV devices that are out there, and everything from heating and ventilating to all the other technologies, all of that is on the internet of devices. It’s very powerful, and we’ll see it anywhere from intelligent buildings where the devices are seen and heard, and you can control for energy and all sorts of things. The internet has changed communication patterns too. I definitely think it’s been the most disruptive technology. And I’m a technology optimist, so I think it’s been disruptive for the good.
www.infocomm.org ONLINE EXTRA
Randy Lemke compares historical predictions of the future with what we have now – and draws parallels between the US in the 1950s and China in the 1990s
www.installation-international.com
Contact: Daryl Brennan Tel : 07757 942894 / Email :
daryl.brennan@
habitech.co.uk www.installation-international.com November 2012 23
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