FIVE PHASES OF RFID EVOLUTION

The way I see it, there are five phases for the evolution of the RFID revolution. They have a sequence which is governed by the invisible hand. The same invisible hand described by Adam Smith who stated that every individual "by pursuing his own interest frequently promotes that of the society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it." In this regard we have the self governing interests of researchers and business collaborating to offer a vertical solution that changes the power of the internet while simulatneously advancing communications progress form the last mile to the last inch.

Entry Phase
Driven by early adaptors who are motivated to gain an advantage in executing their business model. Projects in this stage are closed loop dealing with intra-company business practices and require significant NRE (non-recurring engineering) budgets. Integration complexity is minimized in the scope of work. Although reducing technology risk is a good thing, it comes at the expense of lowering the scope and strategic power to the organization. Think of this phase as putting your toe in the water to test the temperature to see if you want to jump in; however, you have to build the pool first! Placing this bet is non-trivial and only certain high pay-off applications will be able to justify the ante for this wager.

Second Phase
Scope of work and strategic power to the organization is increased. Successful projects endorse and apply standards to increase reliability while incurring a reasonable expense for NRE. Downstream benefits of this stage are scalability and repeatability. The RFID landscape is not fully integrated into the enterprise and represents an intra-company island of automation. Data exporting and importing capabilities improve decision making. Customers experience the impact of the volume and velocity of RFID information and realize they need to seriously address the data warehousing issues lurking below the surface. Tags and Readers are the tip of the iceberg while data is the huge mass below.

Industry standards begin to allow for limited plug and play combinations amongst major RFID infrastructure vendors. Clear and proven standards are not available thereby still requiring large NRE budgets for a project to succeed. Individual standards progress with new and improved releases.

Third Phase
Benefits increase in a few key areas of RFID. First, plug and play capability amongst dominant vendors is available. This drives down NRE making it feasible for wide scale adoption of RFID technology into the enterprise. Second, integration with ERP and other systems is rapidly growing due to off the shelf modules which allow systems to talk to each other and harness the RFID information. Third, real time data flow within the enterprise yields improvements in business practices. Consequently the scope and strategic power of RFID within the organization blossoms.

The Fourth
This phase Differentiates itself by taking RFID outside of the enterprise for large scale integration with secure external entities. Again, this is easily done because infrastructure standards are sufficiently homogeneous with adequate touch-points for integration amongst different corporate applications. Paying heed to the sage advice that time is money ~ RFID connectivity is now streamlined, reliable and offers reasonable risk in terms of project timeframes and budget over-runs. Non-recurring engineering is limited to the air interface for issues like EMI (electromagnetic interference) and achieving 100% read rates. All members within this business space are said to be part of a closed user group (CUG), thereby implying that the CUG's RFID information is not for general public knowledge.

Implementation of the CUG is typically performed in two distinct ways.

The first approach is to increase the number of RFID nodes in the network by sharing raw RFID data within the CUG. In this case RFID information is expanded from internal enterprise stake-holders to CUG members. When RFID information is shared beyond the traditional corporate border it grows in value because of its real time access via the WAN (Wide Area Network).

The second approach focuses on niche applications for RFID which form a vertical integration along a distribution channel, value add chain or specific product line. Corporate borders are ignored while real time sharing of information amongst members is done via a WAN.

The Fifth Phase
Expands on the closed user group with the addition of pervasive tagging and ad-hoc applets anywhere the tags are present. Intra-company and Inter-company applications flourish. Industry trade-groups exist to maintain global databases for access to the public. This requires infrastructure to create and maintain a universal database and a public WAN (very similar to the 411 directory service offering nation wide telephone numbers for users).

RFID science has grown feature rich with cost reduction. The power of networked RFID nodes is realized and provides attractive ROI. Billionaire rebel Sir Richard Branson invests in a new company aptly titled Virgin RFID thereby proving RFID has safe tagging.

We have achieved the benefits of Hal's Law, stated as follows:

Hal's Law
"The COST of a TAG is inversely related to the square root of the number of networked READERS while the VALUE of a TAG increases every time a READER is networked."