I was pleased this morning when, as part of the Daybreak's Street Whys segment, they read my letter concerning the Opus card over the air. I had send the email in a few weeks ago, describing the same problem I pointed to in yesterday's post, but didn't expect it to get any traction.

Here's the audio (RealMedia, ugh...)

In a nutshell, the problem is that the Opus card can't hold STM bus/metro tickets and AMT train tickets at the same time. According to the AMT spokesperson, this limitation does not affect most users. I don't have the data to challenge that statement, and while I would agree that it wouldn't be the majority of users who are affected by this problem, there are still a significant number of people who are.

From day 1 they have sold the Opus card as a one-card solution to your transit fare needs. From the press release announcing the Opus card:

In concrete terms, this simply means that OPUS is the one card that can be used by everyone travelling with the AMT, STM, STL, RTL, CIT-OMIT and CRT, as well as the RTC. The one card that can be charged with every type of fare transit users may need, a single card for access to buses, the métro and commuter trains within the Greater Montreal area and in Québec City;

This is not the service that is offered by the Opus card, and the AMT & Co. do not seem to think this is a problem. They're "working on it," but that hardly makes it a priority.

The spokesperson this morning also complained about the fact that in Paris it took them seven years to implement the same system across the various subsystem, suggesting that we should give them a break and not complain about these problems.

I've worked on enough IT projects to understand how the Opus card situation could have developed. The system is fundamentally a complex one. Technology rarely works as advertized, vendors are not as helpful or forthcoming as you would expect. Your own teams need to get up to speed on the tech, learn by doing, by making mistakes, etc.

Add to that the inter-organizational communications and politics involved when trying to develop a system that works with the internal system of the various transportation organizations. Mix in city and potentially provincial government involvement, and it gets messy and inefficient fast.

Top it off with immovable deadlines set waaay in the past, so that when your project inevitable starts to run over budget (dollars, time, etc), you have no choice but to launch with an incomplete and imperfect system. Your best bet is that you launch with the most important functionality in place, and whatever isn't working will get implemented or fixed later.

Wrap this all in a communications/marketing plan that has as its objective the adoption of the system. Discussions of what the system can't do (like the problem with AMT and STM tickets) are just not going to happen. The mission is to sell the system, and so they will sell the idealized version of what the system is intended to be, what it will one day be.

Which brings us to where we are today: with a new system that doesn't work as advertized.

Now, I also know, having working on numerous IT projects, that often things that don't get done the first time around often don't get implemented at all, especially if users do not communicate the importance of that functionality.

That is my/our role when dealing with any organization in which we consider ourselves a user or stakeholder: if something isn't working, we need to communicate that to the organization in whatever way we think is most effective. We can contact them via email, telephone, etc. Feedback forms, etc can also be effective at communicating into the organizations structures, since formalized information is more likely to be reported on and given visibility and weight in decision-making (assuming the organization cares at all). Going public is also a valid way of communicating with the organization, since it has the chance of mobilizing other users/stakeholders to make their views known as well.

I don't expect the problem with the Opus card to be solved over-night, or even soon. And even if I understand the possible origins of the problem, that isn't going to stop me from trying to do what I can to raise awareness of the problem and get it fixed.