James Taylor's Decision Management

Michael Dortch had an interesting post this week What RFID Means, REALLY – Real-Time, Fully Integrated Data! in which he argues that the coming wave of RFID data will deliver:

real-time, fully integrated data. The more you can know about what's going on at the edge of your network the closer to when it's actually going on, the more opportunities you have to inform, refine and optimize business processes

Now this is all true - RFID information from the edge of your organization will create an opportunity to change your business processes at the operational interface - down at the sharp end. The volume of data, and the speed at which it arrives, are critical however. Streaming RFID information onto a dashboard or reporting on it is simply not going to get it done. So I start to disagree with Michael where he talks about the need to

minimize "time to information"

This sounds a lot like "Those who know first, win" and I think this is misguided. What good does knowing something before your competitors do if you don't act on? What if you know first but take so much longer to decide what to do than your competitors that they respond before you do? If you cannot reduce the time from when you could know what to do to the point where you actually do something then you are not going to win. I wrote about this once before in the context of Richard Hackathorn's work on latency. So I would say

Those who act first, win (provided the action is smart enough)

If you want to take advantage of RFID then build systems that will take decisions based on that RFID data and ACT!