As a technology emerges into a mainstream business process enabler, the trail of successes, mistakes and learning blazed by early adopters becomes a roadmap for those who follow. RFID standards organizations, affiliations of technology vendors, and large enterprise users have brought a common language, educational materials for developers, security acceptable to some of the most sensitive organizations, and a level of mainstream awareness and understanding that has business line managers and corporate IT departments asking a new question: What is the ROI model for RFID?

Achieving positive ROI in an RFID initiative depends greatly on the business problem, the approach taken, the commit...