Exclusive: John Boyd waves adios to Mad Mex

The chief information officer of Mexican-themed franchise Mad Mex Fresh Mexican Grill is departing the company.   

John Boyd, who joined the organisation in 2014 as general manager IT before becoming CIO in February last year, told CIO Australia he was looking for a ‘change in direction’.

“There’s nothing sinister about it. I’m just changing direction and changing careers and looking for a change in the direction of my career to be honest,” he said.

Boyd will continue to work with Mad Mex for the next couple of months.

“I’ve got a few things on the boil. I’m just keeping things under wraps at the moment. Everything will become clear in a few weeks,” he added.

Over the last two year Boyd has transitioned the company’s support office systems to the Microsoft Azure cloud and instigated a country-wide upgrade and standardisation of the communications infrastructure of the company’s 51 Australian stores.

Under his leadership the company also implemented a centralised dashboard monitoring system which identified where issues were occurring at restaurants, and proactively enabled preventative fixes before they occurred.

Boyd also upgraded disparate point-of-sale systems to the Oracle cloud based Simphony system, and rolled out Office 365 to back-office staff.

Speaking to CIO Australia in May this year – Boyd explained Mad Mex’s point of differentiation from competitors was its use of data.

“Being able to segment and report on the data from our point Of sale system and combine it with other company specific sources provides us the ability to create management reports at the touch of button and use those insights to look at sales opportunities, understand our customers, reduce our costs and optimise our rostering and ordering,” he said at the time.

“Now that we have Wi-Fi data, Facebook and Loyalty data we are now working on CRM and machine learning to take us to the next level, having the power to mine the diamonds out of the data,” he added.

Boyd was previously chief information officer for retail, wholesale and online fashion distributor True Alliance. He was named ‘one to watch’ in CIO Australia’s CIO50 awards last month.