What the Heck Is RFID?

With all the recent hype over radio frequency identification (RFID) and the requirements to implement it, you might think that RFID can turn water into wine, transform lead into gold, and cure the world's

diseases. You might also be worried that RFID will enable Big Brother to track your movements to within a foot of your location from a satellite five hundred miles up in space. The truth is, RFID can do none of these things.

RFID is a very valuable business and technology tool. It holds the promise of replacing existing identification technologies like the bar code. RFID offers strategic advantages for businesses because it can track inventory in the supply chain more efficiently, provide real-time in-transit visibility(ITV), and monitor general enterprise assets. The more RFID is in the news, the more creative people are about its potential applications.

The origins of RFID in inventory tracking

Wal-Mart has spent millions of dollars since the late 1990s researching the efficacy of RFID systems to replace bar codes (which have been in use since the days of The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island — that's the early 1970s, for those of you who were around then).

In 1999, with the help of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a consortium of companies formed the Auto-ID Center — a center for continued research into the nature and use of radio frequency identification. The consortium had a new idea about how organizations could identify and track their assets. The vision underlying automatic identification (or Auto-ID) is the creation of an "Internet of Objects." In such a highly connected network, devices dispersed through an enterprise can talk to each other — providing real-time information about the location, contents, destination, and ambient conditions of assets. This communication allows much-sought-after machine-to-machine communication and decision-making, rendering humans unnecessary and mistakes a thing of the past.