Abstract

The advancement of RFID technology has been viewed by many as one of the most beneficial developments in the business world. Furthermore, the progress in this technology has motivated software and hardware manufacturers to leverage RFID capability and drive the adoption of RFID in the data center market. RFID technology holds promise in transforming supply chain management by providing real time intelligence for tracking enterprise assets. As it stands, the objective of RFID is to manage the entire life cycle of an asset by determining the time of initial asset acquisition, the asset's physical location, the asset's movement within a data center and the time of the asset’s ultimate decommission. In addition, RFID is also capable of managing the motion of devices in and between data centers thus enhancing the ability to forecast data center capacity. Although data centers has been readily adopted and implemented in commercial sectors such as the retail environment, its introduction and implementation in the financial market sector has not occurred with similar speed and enthusiasm, suggesting presence of some reluctance. However, financial institutions are being under pressure from clients in order to provide real-time financial data and are looking at data centers integrated with RFID based supply chain systems for this purpose. The motivation for the present study arises from the growing body of literature which has examined the contribution of RFID supply chain systems in data centers and the motivation of financial institutions to use these data centers in order to become more competitive in the market. The paper asks the questions whether the RFID based supply chain systems in data centers can help to improve the performance of financial institutions.