Realizing Greater Business Value of Contemporary RFID Systems

RFID has been gaining momentum in the last few years. To-date many enterprises, in particular suppliers, have found themselves in a position that they must implement RFID to comply with well-publicized high-profile mandates (e.g. Wal-Mart and US DoD). Therefore, many early RFID solutions just did enough to satisfy the commercial and contractual requirements. The solutions mainly focused on technical features like tags, readers, basic tag-reader communications, etc. Future RFID implementations such as in supply chain management and businesses need to include a more comprehensive and inter-relating set of capabilities and to embrace a systematic and integrated architectural approach in order to take advantage of the long-term benefits of RFID technology. This paper proposes a holistic architectural approach that can be used to gain an understanding of the "next big thing" technology, the architectural considerations for designing and implementing successful RFID systems to fully realize greater business value. It is grounded in industry observations and real-world enterprise architecture practice.