We Can Learn A Lot About RFID ROI From The Evolution Of The Commercial Internet By Ashley Stephenson, Reva Systems, Inc.

To say that we can learn a lot about RFID ROI from the evolution of the commercial Internet need not invoke ‘Enron economics' or irrational stock valuations. It refers to the business value the Internet provides today that most people could not envision a decade ago.

Early results of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) pilot projects are pointing out that a return on investment is hard to calculate when that investment doesn't include a reusable infrastructure with multiple business applications layered on top of it. The current approach to one-off trial deployments usually delivers a successful technology trial, but the implementations are often complex and lack scalability. The difficulties and expense of RFID projects seem to compound with each phase, and most pioneers admit that they are not planning to roll out their pilots, as they are currently conceived, across their enterprise. There is currently no crowd of followers behind the early adopters as enterprise managers wisely await a better architectural approach and a better ROI story for RFID.

Yet, today's questions about the money being spent on RFID are remarkably similar to the elusive ROI debate that surrounded corporate Internet projects in the mid-1990s. Just ten years ago, the first enterprise Internet applications were being pieced together with guru-like effort. The work was very hands-on at the department level, enabling particular solutions that individual business groups within the organization decided to pursue. Enterprise network managers were bypassed or just not informed of ad hoc department connections to the Internet. There were some famous cases of clandestine Internet access lines - in one case over a dozen individual T-1's - brought into the same enterprise headquarters by different departments each deploying their own private Internet access solution.