Summary

Standards play a critical role in mainstream deployment of a technology by providing interoperability of components and reducing the risk of regulatory noncompliance. They help increase the overall size of the industry by luring more suppliers (who enter the industry due to the level playing field enabled by standards) and by stimulating more consumer demand (who are more likely to deploy a standards-based technology that doesn't lock them into using one vendor's services). Early RFID deployments were based on proprietary technology used to communicate between the tag and the reader; as a result, these were confined to specific markets. With the emergence of EPCglobal, standards-based RFID deployment is becoming a reality. As with any standardization effort, co-existence of various standards (EPCglobal, ISO, and ANSI) and balancing of industry interests with broader standardization goals is going to be critical to the sustained success of the standards, and eventually the industry. You should plan to deploy standards-based RFID systems while focusing on results and Return on Investment (ROI).

The question remains, though: How do you decide whether to move forward on an RFID project? In the next several chapters, we outline a framework you can follow to decide when to move forward, how to move forward, and what you need to move forward.