More Data on the Way!
RFID promises a gold mine of data. Now what are you going to do when 90 percent of it proves to be pyrite?
Nowhere is that challenge more of a concern than with RFID technologies. "RFID holds great promise, but also great danger," says Kevin Poole, consulting services leader at Capgemini. "Done right, it gets you [data] at a level of detail and specificity—and in a timely manner—better than before. If it's done wrong, there's going to be between 10 times to 100 times more data available, and you run the risk of information overload." Poole says CIOs need to architect their systems to manage this flood of real-time data as well as apply business rules to help control and make sense of it all.
Hau Lee, the Thoma professor of Operations, Information and Technology at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, compares the RFID movement to a gold rush. "All of a sudden there's this wealth of data," he says. "And as we all know, when you go to the gold rush, you need tools and techniques to filter and get the gold nuggets, because 90 percent of it is dirt."
