Blog: William McKnight

« IBM BI - maybe Cognos instead of Microstrategy | Main | Happy System Administrator Day »

RFID for the Information Management Professional

Why push RFID now to the information management market? Waiting for RFID to be 100% proven and standardized is missing opportunities now for ROI. Instead of taking the Wal-Mart mandate and doing the bare minimum, it's a good time to leverage the mandate and incorporate tracking information into the entire supply chain process.

I tend to focus on the things that information management professionals will get into and treat information management as the profession, not data warehouse, or other architectural construct, management. Over just the past few years, that has included DW and CRM (with arguments about which came first), ERP, clickstream, data quality and master data management - anything to do with large volumes of data. In other words, these are the things that an information management career can easily consist of. I'm anticipating adding RFID data management to this list.

As for organizations venturing into RFID, we're talking about innovation. What strikes me is the high variation in RFID applications - it's everything from experimental gadgetry to bet-your-business risk prevention and supply chain management. Whether this data gets added to the data warehouse or, more likely, an ODS-type structure, it's us, the information management professionals, that will manage it.

Organizations should think about "what is causing my sub-par decisions?" and if any of that be alleviated with an RFID approach. Chips can be in practically anything. Does having chips on many things sound far-fetched? IIn 1981, we thought of the personal computer this way.

Share: