"Missing the Boat"

The whispered sentiment in hallways and backrooms at the ORT/Interoperability Summit in Tampa this week is that IBTTA has missed the boat on interoperability since 1990...or before.

Indeed, the notion that we missed the boat is perhaps the most relentlessly whispered sentiment at any IBTTA meeting I have ever attended. To paraphrase the bible, "where two or three toll professionals are gathered, there is regret among them."

Hmm. If we "missed the boat," how could IBTTA have "gotten on the boat" back in 1990 or in any year since then? Would getting on the boat have meant assembling all of the smartest minds in the toll industry in one room to come up with THE SOLUTION for interoperability once and for all? Should the industry have selected the one and only technology solution that everyone would use so that we would never struggle with having different jurisdictions embracing different, incompatible technologies? Should we have forced everyone to adopt the technology and systems of VENDOR A (at the expense of VENDORS B, C, D, E...) so that we could enjoy the benefits of interoperable all electronic tolling and multilane free flow everywhere in North America...or dare I say, the world?

Should we have forced the entire industry to embrace the next generation electronic toll collection performance specification that was developed by a working group of IBTTA in the early 2000s, and which was acknowledged, supported, and approved by the IBTTA Board of Directors as the smart way to go, but which individual agencies turned away from because (fill in the blank -- each agency had a different reason)?

It's an interesting mental exercise to consider what could have, should have, or might have been. However, the most important thing we can do is consider WHAT IS, here and now, and what we can do NOW to make the world (including interoperability) a better place. We cannot change the past. I repeat: we cannot change the past. We cannot change the decisions, actions, or lack of actions that IBTTA, the toll industry, all of its vendors and agencies made or didn't make in the past. We live here, today, on June 15, 2009. We think and live in the present. We can learn from the past. But we should not burden ourselves with it.

Let's embrace the possibility that a new day brings. Let's embrace the possibility that we can learn from the past and make even better decisions today than we made in the past. Let's embrace the possibility that our future will be more orderly and less chaotic than what the past, in our mind's eye, appears to have been.

-- Pat Jones