2026 Alden Conference Recap: Bringing the Alden ONE Community Together

The 2026 Alden Conference brought the Alden ONE community together in Birmingham, Alabama, from May 4 through 7. It was the largest joint use conference to date, with attendees joining us from across the United States and Canada.

Now in its eighth year, the Alden Conference continues to grow because the work continues to grow. Joint use and utility real estate asset management are more complex than ever before, and the people doing that work need dedicated time together to compare ideas, talk through common challenges, learn what is working for other organizations, and take practical next steps back home.

This year, more companies were represented than ever before, including electric cooperatives, municipal power providers, investor-owned utilities (IOUs), telecommunications companies, CATV and broadband providers, and engineering service firms.

The result was a week that reflected the full Alden ONE community. Asset owners, attachers, engineering partners, and Alden team members were in the same rooms, talking about the same work from different angles.

We are grateful to everyone who attended, asked questions, shared feedback, and helped make the week a success. We are especially grateful to our client speakers for sharing their time, experience, and lessons learned. These are the kinds of practical stories that help the whole industry move forward.

At Alden, we often say we work better when we work together. That belief showed up in the presentations, training sessions, breakout discussions, connection meetings, and the conversations happening throughout the event.

What is Your One Thing?

During the conference, Alden CEO John Sciarabba gave participants a practical call to action: What is Your One Thing?

What is the one idea, improvement, feature, process, or data cleanup effort that you will take back home and actually put into practice?

That question offered a strong framework for the week because every session offered something practical. Some takeaways were big. Others were more focused. Meaningful operational change rarely starts with everything at once. It can start with one clear next step.

Practical Takeaways from Client Sessions

The presentations from Alden ONE clients were the heart of the conference. This recap offers a takeaway from each session, with more to come in the Alden Conference Blog Series. Subscribe to Alden Articles to follow along as we continue sharing insights from the conference and the Alden ONE community.

In Cleaning Up Joint Use, Debbie Brill shared how Central Maine Power approached joint use data cleanup with a focus on trust, ownership, and process discipline. Her session showed that having clean data is not just a single project. It is the foundation for more reliable billing, better emergency response, stronger regulatory confidence, and more productive communication with attaching partners.

Steve Lederle and Max Downey from Brightspeed presented Inspection Program Transformation: One Year In with Task Agent, highlighting the company’s move toward greater ownership of its inspection program. Their session reinforced that inspections work best when the asset owner has visibility, confidence in the field data being collected, and a clear process for turning that data into action. Structured mobile capture, consistent training, clear definitions, and strong vendor partnerships all matter.

In Winning at Multi-State Permitting, Melissa Hardman and Jakob Bauer walked through Xcel Energy’s approach to managing permitting across a broad operating footprint. Their session showed that multi-state permitting requires consistency by design, including standardized workflows, automated routing, GIS coordination, and clear expectations for teams, vendors, and attaching companies.

Stephen Schulte of Inland Power and Light Company presented You Might Need a New Contract If..., reminding attendees that contracts should reflect how joint use work is actually done today. Outdated agreements can create operational, financial, legal, and relationship risk. Modernization starts with knowing what you have, prioritizing what needs attention, and applying terms consistently.

Odette Barrows and Hannah Nylander-Asplin discussed Xcel Energy’s work on Processing Multi-State Transfers and Double Wood. Simple transfers and complex transfers require different paths, along with clear communication among the asset owners, construction partners, and asset attachers. When that work is visible in Alden ONE, teams can track progress more consistently and reduce confusion in the field.

J. Gary Bowers looked ahead to the Future of Real Estate Management at Baltimore Gas and Electric. His session showed that real estate data needs the same long-term discipline as joint use asset data. By connecting ROW agreements, rights polygons, parent parcel tracking, documents, research, acquisition, and disposition workflows in Alden ONE, teams can give future projects the benefit of work that has already been completed.

Brian Swiney and Ruben Gonzalez from CenterPoint Energy offered their perspective on Effective Pole Audits, along with a little humor. Their session emphasized that pole audits are only as strong as the data flow behind them. Teams must think through the full round trip before field work begins, including how data moves from the system of record to audit collection, through utility review and attacher dispute windows, into billing, and back into the system of record.

Alden ONE Updates: What’s New & What’s Next

The Alden team shared what is new, what is coming, and what Alden ONE clients may not be fully utilizing.

• Alden ONE + NJUNS API Integration showed how this integration can reduce duplicate entry between NJUNS and Alden ONE, create Alden ONE Conversations from tickets, and help joint use teams keep permits, transfers, and violations moving with less manual status chasing.

• ePay Everywhere offered how payment collection can happen inside defined Alden ONE workflow steps. Payment status becomes visible in the workflow, reducing payment-related stalls, improving speed-to-market, and giving teams clearer visibility into what has been paid and what still needs attention.

• Performance, Scalability, and Security highlighted the work Alden is doing to enhance platform response time, support continued growth, and protect client data. This session covered performance improvements, cloud native architecture, disaster recovery, and SOC 2 controls.

• From Data Lake to Decision Making looked at how operational data in Alden ONE can become more useful for reporting, insight, and better decision-making over time. The focus was not just on collecting data, but helping teams take action on it.

• Task Agent focused on Alden’s mobile app experience for structured field work, including inspections, violation capture, and more. Mobile data capture ensures field teams collect verified information in a way that supports downstream work.

• Alden ONE Platform Updates covered improvements that can help teams work more effectively with a combined map and grid view, saved views, workspaces, and offered a new, exciting way to compare and reconcile datasets, including pole ownership, much faster than ever before.

Connection was the Throughline

Connection between asset owners, attaching companies, and the engineering partners that serve them. Connection between field and back office teams. Connection between GIS, billing, legal, finance, engineering, operations, real estate, and compliance. Connection between the data in the system and the decisions people need to make every day. Connection with the Alden team.

This is why bringing the Alden ONE community together matters.

The Alden Conference gives the people who power, connect, and inform the world an opportunity to learn from one another, share lessons learned, and see what is possible when people, process, and platform are aligned.

Don’t Forget: Take Action on Your One Thing

The value of the conference extends far past what happens in the room. The real value is created after everyone goes home and turns one good idea into an actual improvement.

Maybe your One Thing is a cleaner data process, a contract that needs attention, a feature your team could use more fully, or a conversation with a partner that’s long overdue. Whatever it is, we encourage you to take action on it. Start the conversation. Review the agreement. Bring the right people to the table. That is how the lessons from the Alden Conference become better ways to work back home.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the 2026 Alden Conference. We are grateful for the questions, collaboration, feedback, and conversations that shaped the week.

More to Come

We will be sharing more from the conference in our upcoming Blog Series, including deeper looks at client sessions and Alden ONE updates. Subscribe to Alden Articles to follow along as we continue sharing practical takeaways from the conference and the Alden ONE community.