The Grill: Joe AbiDaoud

Joe AbiDaoud, CIO at Toronto-based metals mining company HudBay Minerals Inc., supports more than 1,400 employees, including 1,200 miners in Flin Flon, a remote outpost in Manitoba where copper and zinc ore are extracted from a mine over a mile underground. Since starting in February, he has overseen the launch of a $20 million ERP project, but he has also been looking for "low-hanging fruit" -- projects with a quick payback. AbiDaoud talked about what it's like to support IT operations in far-flung locations.
Joe AbiDaoud
Role model: Kumud Kalia, CIO at Direct Energy. He is one of the best CIOs in the industry and helped me work into my first division CIO job.
Favorite pastime: I have two children under 2, so it's spending as much time as I can with them. I collect wine, and I like good cigars.
Organization: Organization goes here
Favorite vice: I do love to eat. I love eating out at different restaurants quite a bit.
Recommended books: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't, by Jim Collins. Also Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of 37signals LLC. Anyone going into the workforce should read that book.
What's the most challenging aspect of delivering IT services to a mining business? The operations happen in very remote areas of the world, so we support IT in a decentralized model. We provide regional support at the site of operation and have some centralized IT functions around shared services and IT governance. For the most part, we try to provide end-user support locally. Logistically, that's easier.
The mining industry is closely tied to the economy. When production ramps down, IT is a cost center that needs to be ramped down accordingly. We have to be able to react quickly. We are trying to create some variability in the IT services we provide, so we're looking at servicing some things through external parties. Database support has been outsourced. We're also looking at some infrastructure support. Our IT staff is pretty lean. [HudBay's IT group consists of 12 full-time staffers and seven contract workers.]
What are your key IT initiatives for the coming year? Our ERP project is our No. 1 priority. No. 2 is building out another mine we have in the Flin Flon area, our largest to date. Our No. 3 priority is enhancements to the ERP system, which is expected to go into production in April 2011. The fourth thing is to digitize the exploration and development division's geological data.
What was the business case for the new ERP system? Management realized they couldn't scale. If we went out and bought another mine, we could not integrate that operation onto the platform that exists. If we put a mine in Arizona or Guatemala, we wouldn't have best-in-class systems and business processes for it. Our current business processes are very much custom-tailored to how people were doing things in Flin Flon. They are not scalable. They're very manual.
How does the remoteness of Flin Flon affect your IT architecture? We have mini data centers at these sites for performance reasons. However, I am not sure if we're going to stay with this model. Our new ERP system will be a shared service and will be hosted in our primary location.