RFID Pilot Tips

Computerworld - Early adopters say the trick to navigating the relatively untested waters of radio frequency identification is to assemble a savvy team that can set the project scope, win over business users and make up for the technology's limitations.
Take, for example, the El Paso County government office in Colorado Springs. A six-week RFID pilot project launched this fall to track IT assets involved tagging 265 PCs, 10 printers and 10 tablet PCs. The first step in the project, which would eventually pour retrieved RFID data into PeopleSoft Inc.'s Asset Manager, was to create a business case.
Buffy Dorpinghaus, manager of the Colorado county's PeopleSoft group, met with CIO Bill Miller and desktop and network managers. To sell them on the project, Dorpinghaus explained that the new system would use existing bar-code scripts to cut the time needed to track PCs from 10 minutes to one minute without adding hardware or software or requiring a staff member to visit each desktop.
"I had to give them a caveat and said, 'Let's just try it, and if it's not working out, then great, no harm done,'" she says. The pilot would also be cheap, at under $100,000, Dorpinghaus says. That one-time pilot expense, which also paid for the production license, was a big plus. Had the project been bigger, she says, there probably would have been resistance.
Miller says that although RFID is a relatively new technology for government agencies, the pilot was seen as an opportunity to streamline processes and verify that new software and hardware would work the way El Paso County needed them to.
Next, the nine-person project team was put together. Dorpinghaus was chosen to head the team because of her PeopleSoft applications expertise and ability to map the technology to business processes. Also on board was a non-IT manager, who handled project administration, meeting planning and status reporting, and three IT staffers who would eventually use the system, including one person assigned to transfer the scripts used with the bar codes so they would work with the RFID technology as well.
Jamie Hintlian, a consultant at Accenture Ltd., says this upfront work of building the RFID team with the right skills and creating a solid business case is key. "Make sure the pilot is focused on a common set of objectives and imperatives," he advises. By managing the scope, companies can more easily manage the infrastructure and technology, Hintlian says.
For its RFID pilot, Madison, Wis.-based bicycle manufacturer Pacific Cycle Inc. created a four-person team: two IT