A colleague sent me the following news item about the University of California now offering a certificate program in RFID, as part of its business curriculum:

University of California Irvine Extension said on Monday it has opened enrollment for it's first certificate program in radio frequency identification technology, joining a handful of business schools across the country taking an academic interest in RFID. Classes at UCI begin in January.

Five courses totaling 150 hours are required to complete the program. The first two classes are being offered in the winter quarter and the remaining three in the spring. "The classes are based on business processes, rather than the technology," said Stefano Stephan, assistant director for the Business Management Legal and IT program.

The key point is that this seems to be one of the first, if not THE first, business school in the United States offering RFID training for non-engineers. This program is for business school students, which may perhaps be the most needed type of training because the business issues in RFID deployments are critical and few options exist for business executives to learn about RFID:

But few universities have certificate or degree programs. It's more common for them to offer classes within an engineering program or have graduate students work on research projects with technology vendors such as Sun Microsystems Inc., or customers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. collaborating with University of arkansas. "Compared with the technology, little emphasis has been placed on business processes," said Jeff Woods, Gartner analyst. "It turns out business processes are the more important component to a project."

That's an opinion I share. The business aspects of deploying RFID tend to be big gnarly projects.

As this article from the Meta Group points out, complex business processes must be painstakingly analyzed. Business drivers (such as price, costs, customer satisfaction ) have to be identified and benefits from revising process have to be evaluated.

The need for coursework is all the more important because technology in general can be pretty intimidating to non-engineers, even for business people who work in technology companies. Once you reach a certain level or tenure, the last thing you want to do is to ask what might be perceived as a dumb question.

People assume you know more than you actually do. So your choices are (1) surreptitiously read everything you can get your hands on about RFID, or (2) attend some kind of training away from the company premises. And of course, you want to do your "cramming" as fast as you possibly can, before anyone discovers what you don't know. In the meantime, you sit quietly in meetings, trying to appear sage-like in your wisdom, instead of clueless, until you can get up to speed.

It sounds like courses such as these may help, as will seminars, webinars and reading lots of articles on the topic of RFID.