The power of technology

Established just 15 years ago, Dubai government-owned Emirates National Oil Company has rapidly flourished into a diversified group with international interests. And a vital cog in ENOC’s operations is information technology, as O&G discovers during an interview with Group IT Manager Sina Khoory.

“The complexity of the customer volume and ensuring that your data is always available for decision-making are a big issue for us”
-Sina Khoory, ENOC

Inside Sina Khooy’s office a polished glass trophy sits proudly on a shelf. This prestigious award was given recently by the IT Governance Assurance Forum (ITGAF) – a non-profit organisation created by the Dubai government to assist and promote the development of IT governance practices. As you would expect, the achievement means a great deal to this softly spoken IT chief who is responsible for the technology and systems across the energy group’s vast operations, spanning 30 active subsidiaries and joint ventures.

Khoory, who exudes a calm but assured demeanour, describes the award as “not easy to win” and adds that it was recognition of ENOC’s hard work with the group’s IT systems. “It came at the right time and was reward for the five-year effort by ENOC’s IT here pursuing and maintaining our governance management systems,” he explains whilst glancing at the prize. “It is not the ultimate goal for us but it indicates that we are moving in the right direction, we are mature enough, and pushes us for further improvement.”

This is not the first time, however, that Khoory has got his hands on such a coveted prize; his previous employer the Department for Health and Medical Services (DOHMS), a government-controlled department heavily reliant upon technology, was a past winner, too. As IT Director, he was instrumental in executing and running the networking and information systems integration of Dubai’s four main hospitals and 20 other primary healthcare centres with DOHMS online platform. For ENOC to now win is “double joy”, he enthuses. It was last April that Khoory, who has been an who has been an IT professional since he graduated from university 18 years ago, made the switch from healthcare to energy after 10 years at DOHMS.

A key component
Like many industries, an energy group the size of ENOC has seen IT become intrinsically linked with its operations; you get the impression from speaking to Khoory that it has become the beating heart of the organisation. Since 2003 the group has been making significant overhauls of systems and the technology infrastructure and Khoory argues that the energy industry itself would be paralysed without IT running 24/7 behind the scenes. “Oil and gas businesses rely heavily on the systems that constantly produce accurate data to support diversified and dynamic activities, especially in our group. We have lots of different subsidiaries and operating companies working in different types of business – everything from refining to retail to shipping to bunkering and more. The volume and speed of data required to operate this business is huge and we require complex analytics to make decisions and to do our day-to-day jobs.” Getting an overview of these divers operations is key,” Khoory notes. “You have to understand the dynamics of the various sites that we service and how technology can be an enabler of business success for each one of them.”

One part of the business that Khoory desribes as “especially complex” is the retail operations. In fact, when he joined ENOC he inventoried the information systems portfolio and discovered that almost all of the group’s operations touch the retail arm business in one way or another. The group has a network of 170 ENOC Retail and EPPCO service stations dotted across Dubai and the Northern Emirates, employing 3500 staff.

More than 100,000 customers stop by the fill up their vehicles, use the car wash, purchase groceries or use other services on offer at the garages every day. These customers generate around 300,000 transactions per day or 110 million a year. “At these sites we have all kinds of technologies and an interfacing portfolio of systems. We have full pump technologies, car wash facilities, the point of sale (POS), the payment gateways – including payment technology for utility bills and road tolls and so on,” Khoory explains.

“We also have a CRM system available there, the convenience store and its intelligent grocery business, while there are plans to implement RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies to combat loyalty card fraud, too.” With all this technology, it comes as no surprise to learn that ENOC is gathering and managing data every minute, of every hour, of every day. “The complexity of the customer volume and ensuring that your data is always available for decision-making is a big issue for us.” So are there other challenges that he faces at ENOC? Khoory quickly responds: “Retaining high calibre technical resources in a competitive market like Dubai, as well as maintaining the overall incurring costs of IT on the organisation are challenges.”

Global networks
Another issue for an IT manger like Khoory is the nature of the ENOC group’s international mix of business operations. Centralised platforms are key here.

“We are servicing a broad entities in Djibouti, Singapore and in the future Monaco, where people will use the centralised information platforms to do their day-to-day business – all over the internet through secure channels,” Khoory explains.

And like many organisations today, ENOC embraces staff mobility by opening the network through a secure virtual private network (VPN) so staff can work from home and other locations off site. The infrastructure in place enables staff to work abroad, too.

Despite this flexibility for staff across the group, you cannot ignore the pertinent issue of security as the danger of networks being breached intensifies due to remote working. Indeed, defining your company’s perimeter is becoming all the more harder with staff logging into the network on laptops and other mobile devices from different locations. For Khoory, you have to weight up the risks the rewards, he suggests.

“We try to balance the business needs and the security consciousness. No system is 100 percent security proof and there is always risk taking versus the business benefits you gain from opening up a remote system. This is very important because if an organisation becomes paranoid then even printing out data from the system and taking it home is a breach in security and very difficult to control.” He adds: “We take the industry-standard measures at all levels and in aspects of our work. This can include investing a little bit more in certain security tools and preventative software to allow the business people to work from any place in the world.”

Security aside, right now, and for the immediate future, improvement is paramount. A determined Khoory says he and his team won’t be resting on their laurels after the ITGAF award because they have a clear agenda of improving and redesigning internal processes according to industry-standard frameworks. “For the next year we have performance targets that have to be met here as we streamline documents and re-analyse eight internal processes. We have to make sure they are aligned with the framework, train our internal resources, implement them, and measure it all at the end of this year.” He concludes: “We are always looking to improve – we will never reach the maximum that we can achieve.”