VideoInside Hewlett Packard's CoolTown IT-prototypes showcase in Singapore, Des Yee is in full steam. "This has a biometrically sealed chip," he says, holding up an ordinary looking ID card. "During the personalization process, we scan your thumbprint, capture your signature, take a three-point biometric picture of your face, put in a PIN number or even do a DNA swab for encoding on this chip. Then, depending on the level of security required by your company, this machine will read your thumbprint and compare it with what is embedded on the chip, or your signature, or your face or your DNA swab. Pretty scary, huh?"
Yee, who is director technologist for Asia Pacific and Japan of Hewlett-Packard (HP), the U.S. IT-solutions company, moves on to a new radio frequency ID (RFID) application. "You can now tag brochures, medical records, or whatever paper-based applications you have and put an RFID tag on a tag on a tag on a tag," he says, pointing to a document tray filled with a pile of brochures. "Previous to this, you could not do that, for the reason that if you put an RFID tag on top of itself, it will conflict. This in-tray, developed by Magellan Technology in Australia, can read all the tags inside it. A middleware allows your computer to communicate with the tray and tell you which documents are in there."
Is this Asia's future office? Better believe it. Perhaps DNA-capable ID systems are not for everyone, but RFID-tagged top-secret contracts and several years' worth of tax documents are certainly useful in any firm. And what about an executive PDA that is not only e-mail-capable, but also shows the latest financial statements, sales, inventory levels, and other real-time data while you are on the move? "Our MC50 enterprise digital assistant has a faster processor and more memory than a PDA and can go 10 to 12 hours without a recharge," says Mike Muller, president of Symbol Technologies Asia. The gadget connects to ERP, CRM, and other business applications via a wireless local-area network that allows high-speed access to data within a few hundred feet from the base station.
More important than the James Bond gadgetry are ever more sophisticated software suites that predict future trends, allowing companies to try and forestall profit-sapping developments. "We have a Fortune 100 customer called Ingram Micro, which markets computer systems to interim sellers," says Richard Hale, analytics leader of IBM's worldwide team for business intelligence. "When salespeople turn on their computer in the morning, a dashboard comes up. If there's a red light, the system is predicting that a customer is showing characteristics that it is starting to buy computers from another company. So the salesman is alerted into paying special attention to that customer."
The Future Is Now
Ingram's sales dashboard is an example of a technology that's becoming widely available, developed by global vendors such as Cognos, Hyperion, IBM, and SAS. Indeed, some of the gadgets on show at HP CoolTown are already in limited adoption. The Hong Kong government, for example, is replacing citizen ID cards with embedded-chip ones containing thumbprints and photographs, though not DNA swabs. RFID is now in airports (that strip of plastic on your luggage has an RFID transmitter telling conveyor belts which carousel it should go to) and in Asian factories serving America's Wal-Mart, which requires its suppliers to use RFID tags.
What this tells Asia's CFOs is that the future is just around the corner, and they should start preparing for it now. Some might think that their current systems are adequate, thank you very much. But it would be difficult to maintain that kind of thinking when competitors start making strategic decisions faster, come up with new products sooner, treat their clients better, and, most disturbingly, raid your own customer base more efficiently and effectively. Once one company crosses over, the playing field becomes uneven, and everyone else has to follow or perish.
It's not just an issue of operational edge. "I don't think young people today, when they start looking for work, would want to join a company that is less adequate (in terms of technology) than what they are used to at home and in school," says Singapore-based Michel Gambier, general manager of Microsoft's information worker business in Asia Pacific. The technologically challenged Asian office may end up with a second-rate workforce — and a third-rate bottom line.
So what is the CFO to do? The first thing, of course, is to know what's coming up the pike and see which ones are likely to be what their enterprise will need. CFO Asia spoke with analysts, developers, vendors, CIOs, and CFOs for clues on what may become standard technology in the enterprise environment over the next 5 to 10 years. We think the following areas of business operations are most likely to see technological changes, and therefore should be looked at seriously by CFOs.
1: Smart Cards
At Sun Microsystems in Hong Kong, employees use chip-embedded ID badges to open office doors. "I can visit a Sun office anywhere in the world and enter the premises with this card," says Audrey Lam, a marketing specialist at Sun in Hong Kong. What's more, she can use the same badge to access her own files wherever she is in the Sun world. The company uses a thin-client computer system whose processing power and storage lie with central servers, not the usual desktop PCs with their own central processing unit and hard disks. So a staffer can slip his ID card into a slot in any Sun office computer and access his desktop, enabling him to work in whichever city he happens to be.
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