When Nic Granger took on dual responsibility as Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer of the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), it wasn’t a leap. It was a return to form. After all, her career had long moved between finance and technology.
“I started off with an undergrad degree in business information systems, qualified as an accountant, and then moved into systems and process change,” she says. What connected it all was a fascination with transformation. “How can people work in different ways, whatever their function?”
That question continues to drive her work today – and her vision for a smarter, more capable regulator.
Finance meets digital
For Granger, the roles of CFO and CIO are more complementary than in conflict. “Accountants get a bad name. They’re seen as the people who stop things,” she says. But she prefers to flip the narrative. “You can’t do anything without funding. So finance teams should be seen as enabling projects rather than stopping them.”
In a digital regulator, this alignment becomes obvious. “Putting funding into technology projects enables the organisation to do things it couldn’t otherwise do. They’re much more aligned than people probably think they are.”
What connects them, she says, is data.
“Whether that’s your monthly budget, your end-of-year accounts, or enabling data pipelines for people to get data from A to B, it’s all about getting people the data they need to make better decisions.”
That idea – data as a decision-enabler – is changing how regulators operate. “In regulation, data is just becoming even more important,” she says. Where once information was a by-product of transactions, now it’s an asset in its own right. “You can make better decisions, but also you can think about things in a different way.”
At NSTA, those decisions are grounded in three objectives: “supporting production and UK energy security, helping progress the energy transition and reducing emissions.” That focus is paying off. “We recently published our latest emissions monitoring report, which looks at the emissions in the sector and we’re seeing they have dropped by a third since 2018. So that’s great progress, but we need to keep pushing industry to do more in terms of leading the energy transition.”
Cleaner production is an environmental and social win, in her view. “Demonstrating that production is as clean as possible helps the industry to maintain their social licence to operate,” she says.
From ambition to iteration
It’s one thing to know what needs doing and quite another to do it at scale – and sustainably.
“We’re a relatively small regulator. We always have more ideas than capacity,” Granger says. That lesson shaped one of NSTA’s highest-profile successes: the National Data Repository, which grew from 15 terabytes to more than a petabyte – or, as she puts it, “about 16 years of HD Netflix movies.”
The project succeeded, she says, because the team had clarity, purpose and autonomy. “My role was removing blockers – only stepping in when I’m asked to solve a challenge.” The result is not just a data warehouse, but a foundation for innovation. “We’re seeing it being used to train models for AI to understand the subsurface and for wind rounds in Scotland.”
But if she had to do it again? Granger says she’d avoid “trying to do everything at once”.
She’s a strong advocate for iteration over ambition. “Tech’s changed. Regulation has changed. Things can be done in iterations.” Minimum viable outcomes, built upon over time, are more practical – and often more effective.
The people side of transformation
Despite her technical grounding, Granger doesn’t see technology as the centre of transformation. For her, it’s people.
“Humans generally don’t like change,” she says. “You like to know your environment. So the first thing about bringing people along is making sure everyone understands the purpose and the outcome: how it will make their working day better.”
“The first thing about bringing people along is making sure everyone understands the purpose and the outcome: how it will make their working day better.”
That message runs through everything she does – from building skills and culture to designing digital programmes. At NSTA, she launched an internal Digital Academy to curate resources on agile, analytics, and soon, AI. Training isn’t just for staff. “We trained all the way from our board to give people a common language and toolkit.”
Independent research confirmed that the NSTA team is “open to embracing new technologies.” But the message isn’t that failure is fine – it’s that learning is expected. “It’s OK to try something and then, if it doesn’t work, try something else.”
AI is already here
At NSTA, AI is not on the horizon but already underway, according to Granger.
But the broader focus is automation: “We’ve literally taken what was a paper or email print-cart round the office and digitised that.”
Chatbots and LLMs are currently being explored. But unlike many organisations racing to stand up AI-specific governance, NSTA is leaning on its existing guardrails.
“We started drafting a detailed AI policy, and in the time frame of drafting it, it already became out of date,” she says. So instead, they updated their IT acceptable use policy. “If you wouldn’t put large quantities of our data into Google, why would you put it into an AI agent?”
More important than tooling, she says, are the values.
“We have four core values as an organisation. Two are really important when it comes to AI: robust and accountable.” AI can inform decisions, but shouldn’t make them. “Individuals making decisions are still accountable, whether it’s a regulatory one or a normal organisational one.”
For now, most AI applications will stay close to the back office: “Automating some of our consenting processes, some of our finance processes so our teams can focus on the unusual cases or the advisory side.”
The hardest part of transformation? Letting go of legacy
For all the excitement around new tools and big ideas, Granger is candid about where transformation gets hard.
“We’re much better at piloting and trying new things than stopping old things,” she says.
Legacy systems and siloed processes tend to stick around – not always because of technical complexity, but because of people. “People get very personally linked to their processes,” she explains. “Change can feel like loss, especially when systems are built in-house, iterated over years, or tied to how work has always been done.”
That’s why, for Granger, success doesn’t start with a solution. It starts with sequencing. “There’s no shortage of good ideas, but you can’t do everything at once.”
Her first step? Listen.
“Listen to what people want, why they want it, why they’re thinking a certain way.” That habit, she says, helps surface what actually matters – and keeps digital work aligned to real organisational priorities, not just passing trends or vendor roadmaps.
Collaboration, governance and the politics of data
A lot of NSTA’s progress comes from collaboration. Granger chairs the Offshore Energy Digital Strategy Group, bringing together regulators, government agencies and industry to make data sharing seamless.
But interoperability, she says, is rarely about the tech. “The technology standards side of interoperability is relatively straightforward. It’s more the politics with a little p – who holds the data, what sharing and ownership rights they’re willing to give.”
That kind of complexity – less about systems, more about trust and alignment – is something she’s seen across sectors. Her experience on charity boards, including CAST (the Centre for the Acceleration of Social Technology) and BCS (the Chartered Institute for IT), reinforces the importance of governance that fits the context. “You need to have a way for the organisation to focus on risks that are coming up and give assurance that the organisation is heading in the right direction.”
At NSTA, that means strategies go to the board, the leadership team reviews delivery quarterly, and project oversight lives in a steercom supported by a Security Advisory Board.
What transfers to other regulators
Asked what lessons from energy regulation apply elsewhere, Granger doesn’t hesitate. “Data helps you make better decisions,” she says – whether you’re overseeing oil wells, bus routes or balance sheets.
She points to open banking as an example of how structured data reform can ripple across an industry. “That kind of access and transparency – being able to see your information across platforms – is essentially what we’re trying to do in energy. Whether it’s offshore wind or carbon storage, the aim is the same: to make sure people can access the data they need, regardless of where it’s held.”
But the benefits go beyond compliance. “You can’t run the energy transition without the supply chain to deliver it,” she says. “And you don’t get that supply chain without investment, confidence, and jobs.”
Data plays a central role in making all of that visible – and accountable. “It’s that chain,” she says. “From open data to decisions, from decisions to action, and from action to outcomes.”
Resilience, rebellion – and penguins
When asked what shaped her thinking, Granger offers two very different influences.
The first is Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer “who ultimately failed in his purpose, but showed a huge amount of resilience and leadership, with the team being the important part, not the goal.” The second is Be More Pirate, Sam Conniff’s book on constructive rebellion. “It’s all about disruption and thinking differently – in a good way,” she says.
That same spirit – part resilient, part subversive – explains how she ended up in the Falkland Islands for nine years.
“My other half… saw a job advert with penguins on it,” she laughs. What was meant to be a two-year detour became nearly a decade of new experiences, professional reinvention, and long walks along windswept coasts. “It was a different lifestyle, but one we both really enjoyed.”
It was also where her conservation work began – a thread that now runs through her personal and professional life. She became a trustee of Falklands Conservation, later serving on the boards of CAST, BCS, and the Bat Conservation Trust.
That arc – from data to nature, strategy to service – is a window into how she leads: with curiosity, pragmatism, and a steady instinct for progress, no matter how remote the starting point.
