Overview

The consulting firm of A.T. Kearney listed data integrity as the most important single precursor to RFID success. A report from the company observes: "Many manufacturers and retailers still exchange inaccurate product data despite industry efforts toward standardized data formats."

According to recent research carried out by consulting company CapGemini, more than half the items in company systems contain incorrect data. Examples include wrong values and duplicate or obsolete entries. A spokesperson for Boeing reports that manual data entry produces an astonishing 1 error for every 30 keystrokes.

This is not surprising. The objective of many business processes and systems is the production of documents and messages and current information. Except for financial systems, the creation of a valuable data resource is secondary. As a result, considerable effort is spent getting the work out, but little or none is spent creating perfect data repositories.

The success of your RFID project depends heavily on the integrity of the data it consumes and produces. Nearly all of the data in an RFID application comes from an external systems. The quality of the data is paramount.

Improving the quality of a company's data should be outside the scope of your project, but you have a vested interest in its results. As you raise the issue, you may find a better reception than you might expect. Events at Worldcom, Enron, Arthur Anderson, and other high-profile business failures were, to some degree, data quality failures. The regulatory and legislative response (OFAC, HIPAA, Graham-Leach-Biley, Sarbanes-Oxley,...