Seemingly everywhere you turn in industries as diverse as cattle ranching, retailing, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, consumer products, and defense department logistics, RFID is a hot topic.
Reading the trade press today, you might get the impression that everything will be tagged. Large companies, like Wal-Mart, METRO Group, and the US Department of Defense, are the masters of distribution channels and are insisting that RFID be used. Brand masters, like Procter & Gamble and Colgate, are readying their factories and supply chains to use RFID in ways that allow them to become more responsive to consumer demand and to increase efficiency and flexibility to new levels to meet the demands of an increasingly competitive market. Technology vendors of all sorts, from software vendors to systems integrators to chip makers, are ready to hit the ground running with major implementation projects.
Today, you can hardly find an executive who does not have an opinion on RFID. The hype has reached such a fever pitch that Gartner has released a paper recommending that IT executives prepare for disillusionment. RFID, according to Gartner, can indeed meet expectations. On the other hand, there are few other topics where there is such an obvious need for basic information. Wise IT executives avoid disappointment by not just following the trend, but instead leveraging this new technology where it creates real business value.
However, even the harshest critics of RFID, those who point out all the difficulties with getting RFID readers to work properly, with changing the way that software works and business processes are designed, do not deny that RFID and similar technologies are perhaps the biggest thing to hit the IT world since the Internet, and may be as profound in their ramifications. Some consumer and advocacy groups fear the potential negative social effects so much that they want to stop RFID in its tracks.
What all this hype, activity, and discourse miss is that RFID is not the only point. RFID is just one instance of a bigger concept. RFID will be improved, adjusted and perhaps one day replaced. But the way that RFID can create value – its ability to sense information about the real world in a wholesale manner, send that information to intelligent systems through network connectivity of all sorts, and then respond in various ways that create value – is something new under the sun.
What business executives and technologists in all industries need is a framework, a mental model, and an outline of how to understand the changes that RFID will bring to their business and how to organize their learning. It is important that business owners are provided with such a framework that will explain how the technology works and how it has the potential to change how a business works
With RFID, Think Process and Not Just Technology
As always, the very real danger is that managers themselves will become seduced by the new technologies and then appreciate them only superficially and misunderstand their true purpose and potential.
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