Secure mobility

Providing employees with wireless access will improve their efficiency--but it must not be at the expense of security.

BY SUSAN TSANG

Logistics company, YCH Group, has kept its IT focus on mobile and wireless technologies this year, specifically in the realm of radio frequency identification.

CNETAsiaWeek: What are your company's current top 3 IT priorities?

James Loo: We have to look into better use of Web technologies for internal, and external collaborative work. We are also looking at wireless, things like RFID (radio frequency identification) and mobile computing.

These are very relevant technologies in the realm of logistics and supply chain management. We cannot control the price of RFID tags but we can be creative in its deployment, say, by recycling tags within our own premises.

In terms of mobile and wireless deployment, we are trying to connect as many people to the computer as possible. For instance, information can be captured at the source rather than have someone fill up a form, and pass it to someone in the backend to key the data into the system. Wireless allows us to do that and extend it to the end-user.

When users have connectivity to the computer, they feel empowered and that will further drive IT capabilities. Wider adoption means the industry will move up to another level.

What are the top 3 technology trends you believe will most affect your IT environment in the next 18 to 24 months?
The same areas as in the previous Question.

People are spending money on these technologies and experimenting things like RFID tags. However, the cost of tags is associated with the materials used and the manufacturing process is still expensive. If we can find new materials and new ways to produce the tags, it will bring down the overall cost of the tag. Hopefully, something just as good and robust will come out of the industry. For instance, using plastic instead of silicon (to manufacture the tags)--commercially, I think it makes a lot of sense. Setting up a plastic factory is cheaper than setting up a chip foundry. Any breakthrough in this will definitely propel the demand for RFID.

Also, I think we'll see the convergence of mobile devices coming up. Mobile phones have become like PDAs and multi-purpose machines… cameras as well. MP3 players are also tape recorders. And Bluetooth is starting to take off.

Convergence will bring new devices that come with even more intelligence. The ability to use these devices on 3G will bring more exciting applications. This will bring us to a new frontier. Mobile operators like SingTel (Singapore Telecom) have started running trials. Now, there are phones and PDAs that allow you to access e-mail on the run.

We are touching the tip of technology exploitation. There's a lot more you can do, both from a commercial and industrial point of view as well as from personal computer usage. Some industrial-age companies will be threatened--if you don't watch it, you could be displaced.

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