Text 29, 117 rader
Skriven 2004-09-13 00:19:58 av Steve Asher (3:800/432.0)
Ärende: The Land Beyond Transactions
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The Land Beyond Transactions

With new streams of information, such as RFID and metadata, coming 
on fast, companies are closely following the emergence of two key
advances: "location" analytics and metadata mining. Together, they
could deliver higher intelligence about key business processes.

By Stewart McKie

Analytics add business value by leveraging corporate data streams.
Until recently, the focus of business analytics has been the
transaction data stream. The bulk of business analytics today is
wedded to corporate transaction systems managing financial, demand,
and supply chain transactions. These transactions reflect what used 
to be paper documents - orders, invoices, payments, and so forth. And
there's still a long way to go to optimize and extend the scope and
reach of transaction analytics. But as new data streams are expanding
the domain of analytics, they're driving new directions in analytic
technology. Two such directions are location and metadata analytics.

Look at any business today and the traditional transaction data stream
is just one of many. The use of the Web for e-commerce - online sales,
sourcing, and marketing - has generated new clickstreams to mine to
better understand customer buying behavior and brand preferences.
Digital voice traffic, email, and now instant messaging are also
creating equally voluminous message streams that literally encapsulate
much of the day-to-day conversations of doing business. Web site log
files and call-center or email archive files are the basis for
clickstream and message-stream data analysis. But what's interesting
about the new directions in analytics is that the drivers are less the
data streams themselves but new hardware and new ways of describing
data.

Location Analytics

Location analytics is about creating business value gained from data
derived from location awareness, the movement of people and items
between locations, and location context. Location analytics is being
driven by the proliferation of synergistic hardware, including global
positioning satellites (GPS), mobile/cell phone networks, and radio
frequency identification (RFID) tags. Broadly speaking, people-centric
location analytics will depend on mobile phone and GPS networks, while
item-centric location analytics will depend on RFID tags.

Locating people is already relatively accurate. With services such as
FollowUs a user of a standard mobile phone can be located within 100
meters in an inner city area in the United Kingdom. The latest
cell/mobile phones enabled with Assisted GPS (A-GPS) can bring 
that down to less than 40 meters. (For examples of the capabilities
location-based services can deliver, see the Qualcomm SnapTrack link
in Resources.)

But it's not just people that can be tracked. When a vehicle is fitted
with a GPS-enabled device such as the AsItMoves locator, the location
of the vehicle can be pinpointed to within tens of meters. And there
will soon be literally billions of items (and people) that can be
located once they're fitted with a RFID tag and come within range of
an RFID scanner. A RFID tag stores data that allows a scanner to
record the location of an object (and other contextual information)
when it comes within the scanner's range by reading and writing data
from and to the tag (if required). And these aren't the only devices
generating location data. Closed circuit TV cameras in stores,
streets, and highway tollbooths are also collecting location data in
the form of timestamped images of people or vehicle traffic.

The use of RFID data is particularly interesting because of the
potential and scope of RFID use in a business context. RFID tags have
already found their way not just into "things" - such as delivery
trucks and the items, cartons, or pallets transported along a supply
chain - but also into animals and even humans. RFID technology is not
only used for asset location tracking but also for identification and
recording contextual data at a point in time. VeriChip is a supplier
of RFID tags that have been implanted in humans to allow specific
individuals entry into secure areas or provide medical information to
doctors. Passive RFID tags carry data that RFID scanners can read -
for example, a product identifier, a patient's medical status, or the
origin of a cow in the food chain. Active RFID tags allow contextual
data to be written to the tag as part of a read and write scanning
process including location identifiers, timestamps, and temperature.

Currently, the business focus of RFID is in supply chain optimization.
According to Jonathan Byrnes, a senior lecturer at MIT (see
Resources): "Analytical applications improve supply chain
coordination, ensuring that the right amounts of the right products
are in the right places at the right times. An example of this is
using RFID to get an early read on demand trends, and transmitting
this information throughout the supply chain to align production and
inventory levels." However, improving demand forecasting isn't the
limit of RFID's analytic potential. RFID will become a key part of the
"real-time enterprise" by providing new data streams about the
location, movement, and context of both animate and inanimate objects
within an organization.

But location analytics based on RFID faces a number of challenges. 
The volume of data collected could be enormous. With the potential 
for thousands of scanning devices operating in a large organization
scanning at rates much faster than humans can create and post
"transactions," we could move toward RFID databases that might reach
multiple terabytes - maybe even a petabyte - dwarfing the largest data
warehouses of today. Also, standards are required to oil the flow of
data, like the use of globally accepted Electronic Product Codes
(EPCs) and data interchange metadata such as the XML-based Physical
Markup Language (PML). And there are important privacy and security
implications when RFID is embedded in humans that go way beyond
concerns about who knows when and where you bought a candy bar.

Copyright - 2004 CMP Media LLC

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Source: Raiders News Updates http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/lead-story24.htm


Cheers, Steve...

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