13 November 2024
The hybrid event, held in London with a virtual option via Teams, aimed to facilitate maximum attendance and accessibility, ensuring we could effectively connect with stakeholders and gather their precious feedback.
Transparency and engagement as our main priorities
The event focused on providing a comprehensive overview of Xoserve's key activities throughout the year and outlining its strategic priorities moving forward. This transparent approach fostered an environment where stakeholders could actively engage, ask questions, and contribute to decision-making.
To provide a wider industry context for Xoserve's decisions, the event included guest speakers from across the energy sector, with representatives from Ofgem, NESO, and Imserv sharing their insights.
Xoserve's senior leadership and board members were also present, offering stakeholders the chance to engage directly, ask questions about the mid-year update, and discuss the future direction of the organisation.
Spotlight on Enterprise Architecture
The Mid-year Stakeholder update featured an engaging Enterprise Architecture (EA) session led by Andy Morrey, Xoserve's newly appointed Head of Architecture. Andy began by outlining the core principles of EA and emphasised the critical need for alignment between IT infrastructure and Xoserve's business goals.
He highlighted how EA's consistent framework provides a robust foundation to navigate the challenges of an ever-changing industry. To illustrate this point, Andy explained how EA principles will directly influence key projects like UK Link, Project Trident, and Code Management, ensuring their success within the broader organisational strategy.
Moving from principles to practice, Andy detailed Xoserve's adoption of the Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) methodology. This globally recognized framework, used by 60% of Fortune 500 companies, will guide Xoserve's comprehensive assessment of its technology and operational landscape. As a key deliverable of this EA initiative, Andy introduced Xoserve's new Architectural Principles, a set of 25 recommendations to steer business and technology changes effectively.
This session not only allowed stakeholders to connect with Andy, but also sparked enthusiasm for future technical collaborations. There was clear interest in sessions involving CTOs and Business Architecture Leads from customer and peer organisations, fostering valuable opportunities for knowledge sharing.
Energy Code Reform: what will the future look like?
The central section of our stakeholder update was dedicated to the Energy Code Reform – a necessity to deliver major industry change. In this session, Nicola Garland, Director at Moorhouse Consulting, and Naomi Anderson, Head of Industry Projects at Xoserve, stressed the importance of having an independent body to balance industry and consumer needs, as well as bridge any differences between industry and regulators.
Nicola and Naomi then presented the current landscape and highlighted the need to improve accessibility to the Code, pointing out that an effective architecture framework will help stakeholders have a better understanding of the Code.
They also reminded the audience that Xoserve’s vision for Code Management centres around the modification process, and that real benefits can be gained by aligning all code modification processes where possible.
Finally, they concluded the session by introducing a new white paper by Xoserve that will present gas industry-specific challenges and explain how we can play our part in realising the goals of the Code Reform. The white paper, which will be launched this month, has been completed with the collaboration of a wide range of stakeholders, and promotes the early appointment of a Gas Network Code Manager.
The floor is yours
The event concluded with a lively Q&A session where customers had the opportunity to inquire about the new architectural framework, Code Reform and more. This opened the floor to some interesting questions about budget and delivery timelines for all of these updates, and gave Xoserve the chance to clarify our goals and priorities over the next few months. There was fantastic engagement on the day, with a number of questions left unanswered due to time constraints, please click here to read our Q&A section.
We would like to thank all participants for having contributed to such a successful and fruitful event, and all the panellists who offered their precious insights and know-how. It was great to welcome speakers from a wide variety of industry organisations: we can’t wait to take their feedback on board and build on the success of this event.
We remind everyone that Xoserve welcomes feedback at all times and not just during dedicated events, and that questions, doubts or concerns can always be voiced by reaching out to our team at communications@xoserve.com.
If you would like a more comprehensive overview of our mid-year event, you can read and download the full-length report below.
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