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Disruption? Ride With It

Disruption? Ride With It

Game-changing technologies are a part of IT life. It's up to you to run with them - or get run over

Disruption 3: RFID

Leading vendors: Reva Systems, ScanSource, Symbol

Old thinking: Automating the production line was all about making cheaper finished goods

IT impact: Dramatic changes in the supply chain and ERP systems will let companies keep closer tabs on inventory and production

Trading information between suppliers and distributors will never be the same thanks to the maturation of radio frequency identification (RFID). While the technology is a decade old, new developments in the integration of supply chain infrastructure, more solid standards, and products such as Reva Systems' tag acquisition processor have made it easier to integrate RFID data directly into inventory, supply chain and manufacturing systems. Tagged merchandise can be tracked as it leaves finished-goods inventory, travels across state lines, arrives at the loading dock door and gets purchased by a retail consumer - with each step along the way providing real-time information to various systems. And with Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defence making RFID information exchange mandatory for many suppliers, tens of thousands of vendors are implementing RFID to track everything from pill bottles to palettes to people. RFID enables all sorts of applications such as alarms that sound when items are shoplifted, payment systems that don't require a credit card swipe and automatic employee-access controls surrounding specific sensitive locations.

Older RFID applications were built to locate a particular palette or track a shipment. Tomorrow's applications will enable product line managers to track where all of their goods are in the production and delivery process in near-real-time, letting them closely observe any bottlenecks or supply problems.

The consequences of RFID are huge, especially the infrastructure implications. "RFID computerizes the edges of the enterprise," says Marlo Brooke, senior partner at systems integrator Avatar Partners. This means that companies will need to upgrade networking infrastructure - both wired and wireless - as RFID readers are deployed across the enterprise.

Disruption 4: Software as a Service

Leading vendors: Amazon, Google and thousands more you've never heard of

Old thinking: Build your apps one at a time from the ground up

IT impact: Mix and match your browser-based applications to create cheap custom tools

The Web has become a solid application delivery platform, transforming the way we can deploy enterprise software. Call it a mashup, Web service, software as a service or service-oriented architecture - it all amounts to the same thing: becoming more flexible and nimble while saving a boatload of money by not having to write code from the ground up for each application.

By using these techniques, says management consultant Rod Boothby, "We are on the verge of experiencing a jump in the capabilities of office tools that is just as significant as the jump that occurred when the first PCs landed on people's desks." Instead of picking application partners that have the best prices or series of features, savvy CIOs can order a combination of small-scoped applications that are more appropriate to particular situations yet work well together. Take one part hosted e-mail server, mix in another part Java servlet to process a series of forms, then add an online storage repository from Amazon called by another Web application to configure automated backups and to run batch jobs. All of these can connect to each other via the Internet and may not even reside on your company's servers.

The hard part with all this "Web 2.0" talk is understanding how to take apart your particular application into discrete pieces that someone else has already written. To adapt, IT managers must think in layers, just like the Internet is designed with different protocols that distinguish between lower-level transportation and higher-level applications. According to Doug Neal, a research fellow with the Computer Sciences Corporation Leading-Edge Forum Executive Program, "We finally have a layered series of services that can meet changing [business] requirements. You can pick the right layers to match your needs."

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