Brace for the RFID data deluge
RFID (radio frequency identification), the technology behind wireless sensors used for tagging products to track their location, is getting attention across a number of industries, including manufacturing, retailing, transportation, and logistics. Giants like Wal-Mart, Target, and General Motors are already incorporating it into their supply-chain operations. Although all those RFID tags are barely out the door, RFID vendors are now adding a business intelligence layer to the location-based stack to help a company measure and improve its operations.
However, as RFID gains traction, the major responsibility for tracking the tracking data will fall on IT's shoulders. RFID tags currently hold about 18 bytes of data. According to Retail Forward, a management consulting and market research firm in the retail industry, if Wal-Mart put an RFID tag on every item in every store and tracked every change in presence information, it would generate 7.5 million terabytes of data daily.
It will fall into the lap of IT to gather, sift, and purge all of that incoming data, according to Bret Kinsella, global lead at Sapient Supply Chain Group. The biggest challenge IT and senior managers will have is that of scaling the systems to accommodate all that data and developing data management strategies to separate important data from noise.
