People, Culture and Data: How NSTA drives innovation and the energy transition

NSTA’s Nic Granger outlined a people-first digital strategy at IT Leaders' Summit

In a keynote at the Computing IT Leaders’ Summit, Nic Granger, Chief Information and Finance officer at the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) set out the importance of people and culture to innovation and NTSA data and digital.

“Our first priority is to accelerate the energy transition,” Granger said. The second is to reduce emissions and decarbonize that supply as much as possible, and third to ensure the UK has the energy production and security that it needs.

“Emissions reduction is a key transformation for the industry. We also recently issued 21 licenses for carbon storage. Those licenses have the potential to capture up to 10% of the UK's annual emissions. We can't do that as an industry without transforming the way the sector works and the way that we use data to enable that. “

People and culture are central to the ongoing success of this digital and data strategy.

“My personal view is that technology is not the difficult part of that equation,” said Granger, “It's how you embed that technology, and that is all about people. “

With people, skills and culture as the first pillar of a five-point digital strategy, NSTA set up a Digital Academy focusing on awareness and training.

“We have digital ambassadors,” Granger explained. “These are individuals who have expressed an interest in digital and data. They don't have to have a huge depth of experience in that area, but what we are asking to people is an enthusiasm around digital data.”

agile not Agile

That wave of enthusiasm led to a decision to implement agile across the whole organisation, not in a strict methodological way but enabling people to cherry pick the parts they find useful.

“We tried to avoid some of the language of Agile methodology because some people found that not particularly inclusive. But what we did find was a great interest in that way of working so we made that training which was mandatory for the top tier and available to everyone else who was interested. What we have now seen is that training is being used across the organisation in different ways. “

Innovation was the key objective, both in NTSA itself and in the industry that NSTA regulates. The problem was that innovation was being crowded out by the day-to-day pressures of service delivery.

“One of the pieces of feedback that we had quite a lot was that people just didn't have the time to be able to innovate,” Granger said.

“Constant service delivery meant that they couldn't step back from the day job and think about doing things in a different way. We started piloting ‘innovation time’ across my team. We did it every other Wednesday afternoon. And then rest the organisation started to ask why my team were allowed time off to try and find new ways of doings things so we rolled this out about a year ago to the whole organisation so now on the last Wednesday of every month everyone has innovation time in their diaries.

“I won't pretend that it's perfect, but what we have found is that people have started to use that time in a different way and to good effect. “

An example Granger shared was an application put together by a member of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) team in consultation with some other government organisations. As Granger says:

“We didn't ask them to put this together. They just said, ‘wouldn't it be cool if we could have all the energy in the marine space in one place from various organisations, so that we can understand what other organisations space is being used? This is now our most frequently used app.”

“What this shows me is that freeing people up to be able to make the decisions in their own team leads to great outcomes. They don't need me to tell them what a good idea is. This has led to our GIS services being recognised with global awards and more importantly, it has made data available to the industry that we're trying to regulate.”

“For me if you don't have the right people, if you don't give people the right mindset and create the right culture then it's really difficult to do the technology part of your transformation.”