 “When I came home and began to watch another game on a regular fidelity TV, you just can’t do it. The view is too poor,” he said. “We can use that analogy in business and how we think about the power of RFID data.”
“Just imagine when you are a CPG company and you can see where every end-of-aisle display is within a tenth of a second as it moves out to the floor during a promotion, or if you are a CIO you can see where all of your computer network assets are in real-time across the globe,” he said. “You can’t go back to where you were before after you have that kind of visibility.”
So, given that potential, why haven’t companies adopted the technology more rapidly?
The biggest barrier, he said, is the same one often encountered in new technology areas – “change management,” or the capability of companies and individuals to embrace new ways of doing business, especially if those involve substantive changes to existing business processes.
“Process changes in a company are much slower to evolve than the technology,” Frew said. “For awhile, I think there was a belief you could just spread RFID pixie dust on a corporation and change would happen, but it doesn’t work that way.”
Isn’t that always the way it is with new technology?
“Yes, but we thought maybe this time it would be different,” Frew acknowledges.
On the need for better software that can leverage RFID data:
Getting the XML data out of the reader and sending it somewhere is almost trivial these days, Frew said, meaning the physical and middleware layers of an RFID system are really almost non-issues these days in terms of generating RFID-based information.
But, “There aren’t enough programs and applications yet that can take advantage of the data. There was a focus for a long while on the middleware, the low-level stuff, but that’s being commoditized. The real focus should be above that, at the application layer,” Frew said. “What is happening at the hardware and middleware layers now is generally fine and not at all a barrier to adoption.”
Software providers need to get into the trenches and think more about how real-time RFID data can drive very different sorts of applications – and help users do their jobs much differently.
“You have to build applications that understand, for example, how the data center manager really does his or her job, what kind of information they need to do that job better,” said Frew, referring to asset management applications for corporate computer networks. “We’re just scratching the surface of that at this point in terms of supply chain applications.”
“We are talking about new ways of thinking. Companies are doing some pilots and seeing the value in a limited application, but then they have to extrapolate those results across a broader deployment. But they want to get to that better place,” he said.
Part 2 of our interview with Frew will run next week.
Do you agree with Frew’s perspectives on the RFID market? What would you add to his comments? Let us know your thoughts at the Feedback button below. |
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There aren’t enough programs and applications yet that can take advantage of the data. There was a focus for a long while on the middleware, the low-level stuff, but that’s being commoditized. The real focus should be above that, at the application layer.
