The recent Leadership Summit hosted by AIM NA (Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility) in Chicago had good international representation, with representatives attending from China, Russia and other nations. Summit award winners are listed here: http://www.aimglobal.org/members/news/templates/template.aspx?articleid=4078&zoneid=1.
I liked the expanded thinking of keynote speaker Tom Miller of The Sage Group who made historical reference to disruptive change in the auto ID industry – changes such as pen-based computing, 2D imaging, and cloud services. I enjoyed looking back at the points in recent history when those innovations were introduced and the practical uses that have resulted from each.
I would add one perspective to Tom’s insights. It is often the combination of technologies that drive change, along with the way we leverage technology. The goal of A2B’s customer base is to leverage technology to produce highly accurate data, and auto ID is the means to that end. We’ll look back ten years from now and realize that it was the convergence of technologies that was the true innovation – what I often refer to as the “Force Multipliers.”
Mobile computing, ubiquitous 2D imaging, global data capture standards (UID via MIL STD 130, pRFID and MIL STD 129, UDI for medical devices), cloud-computing and much more will contribute to a powerful infrastructure that will enable massive organizations such as the FDA and Department of Defense to gain insights never before possible. The economic revolution that began with auto ID fifty years ago is rolling along and picking up steam.
