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utILIty WEEK | 23rd - 29th January 2015 | 17 Policy & Regulation Steve Adcock head of It investment & solution delivery, Xoserve "The capabilities and competencies required to be a company with a real focus on customer service and innova- tion can be very dif- ferent to those that networks have tra- ditionally required. This may require a different approach in delivering against RiiO" "It is a challenge to build in the resilience and capacity to deal with peak demand/ incidents in an effi- cient way. It requires a very different way of thinking about customer relation- ships and priorities. The expectation of 'always on' instant service may need to be better managed." Mark Ripley director of uK regulation, national Grid "It's natural that companies will continue to make their case [with the regulator] over market structures right up until a decision is made. But then you get on with it. In actual fact, we started think- ing about how to prepare our business for RIIO six to eight months before we knew what the final proposals were. We undertook a restruc- ture, which was all about getting our organisation ready for RIIO; being ready to live in a world that was output based rather than capex based and making sure our people understood the changes." Maxine Frerk interim senior partner, smarter grids and governance, Ofgem "We hope that a really challenging price control will encourage the net- works to find ideas wherever they can get them and not to be too precious about whether they thought of it first." "Our thinking has moved on a bit [since Utility Week's RIIO research was published]. We are no longer relying on the Decc impact assessment to justify the savings that can be achieved through smart metering. One of the companies included more [in their ED1 business plan] in terms of their thinking about smart meter savings and we are now using that as our benchmark." What does success look like? Attendees were asked to define what outcomes would define RIIO as a success for them. They said: 1. A better customer experience 2. A more reliable network 3. Learning how to achieve effective innovation in advance of bigger system challenges in ED2 4. Achieving end-to- end alignment of objectives within the network companies Brought to you in association with