This year’s Waterfront conference on the subject of smart cards used in public transport within the UK (now with a nod to mobile phones as alternative carriers of the smart token) was held at the London premises of lawyers Bircham Dyson Bell. An appropriate venue, with the new government in place and with relevant parts of competition law both about to be reviewed and also currently being used in the study into the operation of bus services. And an excellent team of speakers.

The keynote address was given by the CEO of ITSO Ltd, Michael Leach. He introduced the company’s developing strategy under the heading Developing a Roadmap for the Future of ITSO. Featuring strongly is the evolution of ITSO “into a customer-centric, service oriented organisation with the capacity and capability to work in partnership with our members”. For the supplier community: “We must move all ITSO products onto the latest version of the specification quickly and cost effectively. This will require the development of new ways of working between ITSO and the supplier community and a move away from ITSO only providing a ‘technical toolkit’.”

Those are fine words, but they need anchoring in solid ground. That ITSO did not develop a comprehensive system-wide strategy for both function and information security has been well known for 8 years. The Martini principle of an ITSO card being useable ‘anytime, anywhere’ stretched only to being able to load and use local ticket products wherever you are: no provision, either in card or terminal, for common methods for through ticketing or even for helping you to cope with local ticketing in the places that you visit. But make no mistake: the ITSO Environment’s distributed architecture is a major achievement - multiple interconnected schemes, and many product-led organisations (private or public sector), all being able to connect to any back office node and receive data from any other node. Now we need to go beyond bus passes and rail season tickets - we have to transform historic ticket products into common electronic products rather than simply code them up as 2D barcodes.

ITSO Ltd is in effect a co-operative, with public sector, service operators as private sector bus and train companies, and suppliers, all bound together - but it is also a company limited by guarantee, so in effect the company’s Board rules. And, from the middle of 2009, the Board has been controlled by the votes of the Dept for Transport.

But ITSO Ltd is also the government’s Regulator of smart media ticketing where that method uses the ITSO Environment of smart media, compliant equipment, the VPN that interconnects the schemes, and the security key and permissions service. Regulation is by way of the ITSO Licence from DfT and the growing number of subordinate Licenses granted by ITSO Ltd to the schemes – no statute law about this regulation beyond the competition provisions that are, we heard, soon being reviewed. In practice the Licensees are a self-regulating co-operative until ITSO Ltd intervenes. In this regulatory regime the supplier chain sticks out like a slightly sore thumb, because on the one hand supplier members of ITSO are not a party to operating via the Licenses, while on the other hand they are suppliers to the Licensees – the ITSO community has to resolve that.

Another key presentation was about the Scottish Entitlement Card scheme, contrasting it with the failure of the English Local Authorities to develop either an equivalent national scheme or anywhere near a full set of local schemes using common methods. Sid Bulloch gave his view that effective use of smart technology for non-transport citizen services needs central co-ordination and core finance. And, very importantly, those operating a scheme must have specific training: in Scotland over 70 people have gone though that training (would need 700 people in England for the same ratio of trained staff to population). Repeated for us was Janice Morphet’s reported comment on the aftermath of the English National Smart Card Project (which some years ago was promoted by the Office of a previous Deputy Prime Minister): we let 1,000 flowers bloom, but they died at the end of the year. But Mick Davies, in his LASSeO role, encouraged us to not despair in the task of improving service delivery by being smart.

Although not described on the day, the Dept for Work and Pensions with its ‘Building a society for all ages’ has been dipping its corporate toe into the citizen service smart card waters (see http://www.hmg.gov.uk/media/33830/fullreport.pdf - its intro page http://www.hmg.gov.uk/buildingasocietyforallages.aspx has been copied away to the National Archives for the time being). Although they were thinking of starting with further uses for the bus passes (English National Concessionary Travel Scheme), unfortunately DWP’s effort turns out to be a ‘learning on the job’ exercise – it ought to be a training opportunity for the supply chain.

Thanks are due to Smart Card News for securing for SSeSA a Press Pass for this conference. An extended version of this article is expected to appear in Smart Card and Identity News at the end of June.