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RFID Clouds On The Horizon
For all the hype and promise that RFID brings to the table, there are a lot of people that believe it's not going to be planned well enough. Network world has a great article about this. From the article,
Dave Husak, Reva's CTO, has a nightmare vision of the next phase of RFID. Imagine, he says, a Fortune 100 applications architect or CIO walking up to the network IT manager's desk and saying "I've just bought 500,000 RFID readers. I'd like them installed and operating.""I can guarantee you that guy [the network IT manager] has not been at the table during the RFID discussions," Husak says.
Everybody's talking about the readers and the tags, but nobody's talking about how it hooks up to the infrastructure. I've got another thing nobody's talking about either: how the business process is going to work in mixed-mode environments.
In a non-RFID world, you receive by writing down what you got. In an RFID world, it's supposed to happen automatically. Well, what do you do when you've got a pallet with some of each on there? Count? Scan? Do both? You could easily be in a situation where you would do twice the work, perhaps more. Not exactly something to shoot for.
I think RFID has a lot of promise, and the bugs will eventually be worked out. But now is the time to plan for the bugs, and what to do to fix them.
UPDATE: In another InfoWord story, Ephraim Schwartz makes the case for using active RFID instead of passive, especially in chatoic deployment situations.
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