Why “good enough” data sharing practices are not good enough

The UK Transport & mobility sector seems to have settled on a “good enough” approach to data sharing and interoperability.

This amounts to a reverse tragedy of the commons scenario across the sector, where every transport provider or authority deliberately under-invests in their own data sharing technology capabilities, as they see no point working for the collective good by making their systems more interoperable and sharable… because none of the other actors with the ecosystem are doing the same.

This creates the situation where the consumer of those services may not even be aware of the potential of a better mobility service and where the transport providers look for incremental revenue for themselves in non-data ways. Plus the transport providers in that ecosystem become accustomed to this technological stalemate, even if it could mean less potential revenue for the entire sector or a lack of overall innovation driven by data.

However we think this is the tragedy and that more needs to be done to encourage and force data sharing across the sector e.g. Open Data, Shared (and therefore limited by license), but especially that part of the data spectrum that makes named access customer data more sharable from provider to provider. To do this requires an ecosystem-wide strategy and implementation approach, where all players are encouraged or mandated to increased their own data sharing capabilities.