Home > Management and Careers

Computerworld -

RFID Is Showing Up on Food, Tools and Casino Chips

Image Credit: Getty Images

A recent report from Forrester Research Inc. says that eventually, the radio frequency identification market as we know it today will disappear. Why? RFID will move beyond the supply chain and simply become a sensor technology embedded in a wider variety of business processes, such as "predictive maintenance" and real-world market research.

For example, Northfield, Ill.-based Kraft Foods Inc. uses RFID-tagged containers to track the location and freshness of the ingredients it uses. A grocery retailer can use RFID-tagged shopping carts to monitor and analyze shopping patterns in the aisles. Several firms are using RFID chips to keep track of expensive tools that tend to "walk off" construction job sites. Gaming Partners International Corp. in Las Vegas has already sold 3 million RFID-embedded gambling chips to casinos to fight counterfeiting.

Marsha Thomson, IT minister of the state of Victoria in Australia, returned from a trade fair in Japan predicting a world where sensors are everywhere. She says she saw RFID chips "the size of glitter" that could be sprinkled on enemy forces during warfare and used to track troop movements.

She also saw RFID used in fruit shipments. The chips contained information such as the fruit's country and farm of origin, batch number and use-by date. They also identified any chemicals it may have been treated with if it wasn't organically grown.

— Mitch Betts and Michael Crawford (Computerworld Australia)

Best Bits
The most useful parts of recent business and IT management books

The book: Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results From Knowledge Workers, by Thomas H. Davenport (Harvard Business School Press, 2005).

They like to be left alone, you can't tell them what to do, and they don't particularly want to be managed. Their work is often unstructured—different every day. They tend to be mobile and work in collaborative networks. They're called knowledge workers, because their primary job is to create, distribute or apply knowledge. It's a class of workers—at least 25% of the U.S. workforce—that includes doctors, lawyers, strategists, managers, programmers and marketers.

So far, corporate management has pretty much kept its paws off these think-for-a-living employees because Industrial Age productivity-enhancing techniques don't work. But Babson College IT and management professor Tom Davenport argues that the laissez-faire approach isn't good enough anymore. He joins management guru Peter Drucker in saying that the challenge of our times is to find ways to improve the performance and results of these knowledge workers, because they're the key to organizational growth and economic success. Knowledge workers are the ones who come up with new business strategies and products. They're also the most expensive employees in the company.