Elko, Nevada is no Silicon Valley. A recent front-page story in the local paper hailed inductees to the Buckaroo Hall of Fame, a nod to the town’s cowboy past. Inside, a full-page spread detailed the aspirations of the kids vying for homecoming king and queen.
Yet it’s here, in an unremarkable warehouse in the foothills of the Ruby Mountains, that Barrick Gold Corp. has created an in-house coding hub to design software for its nearby Cortez operation — one step in its plan to use technology to revolutionize the business.
From underground WiFi to sensors that track the output of every miner, it’s all part of what Cisco Systems Inc. Executive Chairman John Chambers calls an “audacious goal” by his Barrick counterpart John Thornton to drag gold mining into the 21st century.
“The challenge is to move from thinking of it as a series of tasks to a sort of self-perpetuating machine which becomes the culture,” Thornton said during a recent stop in Elko, about 420 miles (675 kilometers) from the bright lights of Las Vegas.
“You move — to make it slightly dramatic — from being a mining company, to being a digital company that happens to be in mining.’’
For the rest of this article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-30/barrick-s-digital-reinvention-taking-shape-in-nevada-desert