Today Supply Chains are vulnerable to security threats and the uncertainties associated with them. A lot of experts believe that RFID is an answer to this problem. But RFID industry is a volatile and rapidly changing industry itself and so it has become a dilemma for CIOs to whether to implement it or not. I have asked some basics questions which shape the concerns of CIOs today in an interview with Anita Campbell, Serial Entrepreneur and author of RFID-Weblog. Today you read the first part:

What are the important issues in RFID industry today?
Today the overriding critical issues are (1) costs and (2) privacy concerns.

Costs, because the cost of implementing RFID is just so high in many industries, that it's hard to establish justifiable ROI. This is especially true in supply chain and manufacturing implementations. Costs consist not just of the tag cost, but also the learning curve and labor costs, as well as the software costs. There are virtually no low-cost plug and play implementations available today. Everything is still more-or-less a custom project and often involves expensive consulting help to bring in the necessary expertise, software code that must be written specifically for the customer's systems, etc. With even the cost of a limited slap-and-ship implementation exceeding $500,000, and more extensive implementations many times that amount, it all adds up to quite a big ticket expense. Companies are still struggling to determine that they will get enough benefits in return, to exceed all the expense of deploying RFID. Outside of a few limited situations, right now most small to midsize businesses cannot afford to consider RFID -- only the largest companies can afford it. So it is a relatively small number of businesses that are seriously looking at RFID -- the largest companies -- all due to the costs exceeding the benefits or perceived benefits.

Privacy concerns are another issue, primarily in two areas: tagging people, and tagging individual items that may end up in the consumer's possession. People feel as if tags might be used in a Big Brother sense. That could lead to a backlash of overzealous legislation out of fear and lack of knowledge. So it is going to take education and, I believe, some self-policing by the industry to enable consumers to feel comfortable with RFID. Often I read comments and concerns about RFID that lead me to believe that consumers overestimate the powers of RFID, and do not understand its limitations. Once they know more about the limitations of read ranges, for instance, or how encryption can minimize data theft, I am convinced they will become more comfortable with RFID. And then, once people understand more about RFID and it ceases to be so mysterious, their privacy concerns will diminish.