Business Impact of Pervasive Technologies: Opportunities and Risks

Despite heavy investment in integrated information systems, many business problems still prevail due to a lack of integration between the real and virtual world. Low data granularity presently limits enterprise computing. In order to solve these problems, data granularity needs to be increased and the digital management control loop must to be closed. Pervasive Computing, including automatic identification, is the technological enabler. Once closed digital management control loops are in place and generating high data granularity, incremental process changes such as an automatic quality check, enhance the overall efficiency of controlling intensive processes. Object value logging and embedded services are examples of more radical changes, which not only affect processes, but also business models. However, although the pervasive technology-based development road map of future enterprise computing systems seems to be straightforward, various risks and challenges have the potential to strongly influence the technology adoption path.