Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is a method of identifying unique items using radio waves that communicate between RFID tags and readers without line‑of‑sight readability. Application areas include person identification, logistics, pharmaceutical, access control, security guard monitoring and asset management. One of the areas where RFID promises excellent potential is in the retail industry for the tracking of goods and products throughout the supply chain. There are concerns around numerous RFID adoption barriers. Decision makers in the South African retail sector seem to be adopting a wait‑and‑see approach. In an attempt to identify and explore these barriers, a literature review was conducted identifying 29 unique barriers to RFID adoption. A survey instrument, informed by these barriers, was constructed and administered to members of the retail sector in South Africa. The research reveals that the South African retail sector is aware of the benefits in adopting RFID technology, however, they have identified numerous adoption barriers that will need mitigation before they will commit to adopting RFID. The research confirms six main categories with several adoption barriers in each, needing to be addressed. The main categories include, RFID skills shortage, a lack of standardization, high costs of RFID devices, the difficulty of integrating with current legacy systems and a lack of familiarity with RFID systems.

This paper analyses the relation between two well‑known business concepts. It clarifies how business models, as an implementation of a companys strategy, can be aligned with business cases, as an abstraction of a companys operations. The relations are a nalyzed from a static as well as a dynamic point of view by means of inductive reasoning and literature review. Based on the understanding of the relations, a continuous business model‑business case alignment approach is proposed. Further, managerial guid elines are presented supporting the approach. Finally, two software tools, business case framework and business model composer, are presented indicating how the proposed conceptual alignment could be implemented. This paper contributes to research and pra ctice. Both can benefit from the conceptual relation between two well‑known concepts that have hardly been linked so far. Practitioners can apply the proposed alignment approach and the managerial guidelines to review their business. For research, we cont ribute to the body of knowledge of business model concepts. Researchers can build upon this fruitful ground by validating the proposed concept in empirical settings or by implementing software solutions supporting this approach. Consequently, the agility of companies can be increased when implementing merged or changed business models in the organization and when using business cases to determine if it is time to change the business model.