ETS Transition Update

Foreword - Mike Henry

I’m constantly reminded how lucky I am to work in a company with good people.  I appreciate people that are passionate about what they do, what outcomes they achieve and take pride in the quality of their work and making things better in some way for others.  I have had some ‘robust’ conversations recently with both colleagues, team members and vendors and always come out of those conversations more knowledgeable and with a greater understanding and appreciation than at the start.  My learning is not to be afraid to challenge others (respectfully) and don’t believe issues are “somebody else’s problem” when you think there could be a positive or negative impact to Elanco. 

In ETS we are trying to achieve that in our team by pushing key principles across the team as part of our foundational culture.  We have several, but the current focus is to work out loud.  By telling people what you are doing, what decisions you must make and what roadblocks you have, you allow others to understand what’s going on.  They may only be able to empathise, but sometimes they can help - and it always increases understanding from others.  So why not try it?  You’ll see from this edition of our update that we have made some key collaboration decisions, one of which is Microsoft Teams.  If you’re not already using Teams (which is available through Lilly today) then why not try it out! 

As always, we are keen to get questions in, so we know what really counts for you all and what questions you are being asked.  Please do this by emailing Jo Joss or posting in the ETS – Ask Us Anything channel in Teams.  And if you think we’re not living by our values, call it out and challenge us!  

Enjoy the update. 

Your ETS friends. 

… 

FAQ - All

Should I move all my documents over to OneDrive from Box?

OneDrive is going to be the tool of choice in the document storage/sharing space in Elanco’s future. We know that Lilly have turned OneDrive on, but they are excluding Elanco employees from communications to avoid confusion. Please cascade the message that whilst OneDrive will be a future tool for Elanco, users should not migrate all documents from Box to OneDrive at this time. Users are welcome to explore OneDrive to familiarise themselves with the tool, but please advise against using OneDrive as the default storage solution until further notice. Migrating all the Elanco files from Lilly to Elanco’s Microsoft tenant is a complex job which we are in the planning phases of now. 

“Will we reuse the existing Hardware (ESX Hosts)? Will ETS deploy some new hardware to build new ESX clusters? What is the strategy regarding the locally hosted applications and systems?”

The general principle is that we should reuse all hardware; these will become Elanco assets and we should minimise our transition costs wherever possible. 

The application owners will need to look at their portfolio and see how to refactor the apps, if possible, to follow the new Elanco recommended hosting patterns, which should (hopefully) reduce the dependency on the local compute environment. We are almost at a point where we will be able to share the hosting patterns with you, so stay tuned. 

“Will we be allowed to export our VMs and import them on a new infrastructure or will we have to reinstall all systems from scratch?”

This was one of the key topics at the Site Cutover Workshops last week. Lilly understands that for us to have to delete and rebuild VMs would be hugely impacting on the Manufacturing and R&D sites, however they still feel that the default position must be to delete them and start from scratch. ETS have some follow-up requests to Lilly for how we propose to proceed with site cutovers and what we need from them, but of course we want to make sure that we will be meeting the needs of the business, so this will be refined carefully in the coming weeks. 

“What new tools are we having?”

Jo is currently working on an update which will show the current tools in use and what the proposed replacement will be. Once this is approved by EAC and the IT Lead team, we will share it broadly. 

Network - Paul Graham

The site, security, collaboration and network workstreams all joined up last week for key discussions with our Lilly counterparts to consider the approach to cutting over the sites to the new Elanco environment.  The tenets we unanimously agreed were: 

• No Risk to Life & Safety (People & Animals) 
• Maintain Customer Experience 
• Brand Protection 
• No Impact to Production 
• Maintain User Experience 
• Ensure Confidentiality 
• Ensure Security 
• Transparency/Visibility 
• Minimize Financial Impact   

With this in mind, and with some robust debate, both the Elanco and Lilly teams agreed on processes that would provide for flexibility throughout the transition.  This high-level proposal needs to be discussed with our business colleague to ensure that it will meet the tenets above; following this, there are further in-depth negotiations to be had with the Lilly technical teams to finalise the exact solutions to be implemented.   

Next week should see the finalisation of the request for pricing (RFP) document that will be used to source our future managed network service provider.  This partner will work hand in hand with our operations team, looking after all elements of the network and colocation environments; updates to follow on this. 

Identity - Calum Bell

The big focus of Identity is ensuring that we are remaining lock-step with the core systems in Elanco’s future, during our transition we’ve been working on two key focus areas:  

1. Workday, we’ve been working closely with Global Services to ensure that we remain lock-step in our designs and implementation so that we will be ready to make the connection to our Master Identity Management Solution later this year.  
2. Lilly, to ensure we maintain our Identity on Lilly’s network whilst building our own we’ve begun talking to Lilly to discuss our shared needs and requirements to keep both the Elanco and Lilly systems synchronised during our transition.  

In the background, we are preparing for implementation to begin, to facilitate this we have been scaling up our team from WWT and on boarding three new engineers and a consultant to start building out the solution once we have our Cloud environment. Throughout the past two weeks we have delivered a comprehensive portfolio of documentation to prepare us for implementation including:  

• AD Documentation (80 pages long!) - How will we build our new AD environment?  
• Communication Brief - How we manage our communications regarding IAM to minimise any business disruption?  
• Why use Master Identity Management? - What are the architectural benefits of our model?  

If you would like access to any of this information, please reach out to me and I’d be happy to share.  

Cloud – Calum Bell

Currently we are working hard to ensure that we are ready to hit the ground running in terms of implementation as soon as we have finished procurement activities regarding Microsoft Azure, to this we are working on the following tasks:  

• Elanco’s Cloud Demo, this demo will be recorded to represent how we are currently thinking about the user experience for the Developer, App Owner and Operations Lead in our current architecture, this will then be shared more broadly to gain feedback and input to influence our final design.  
• Cloud Architecture - We are currently finalising our Architecture plans for the cloud and identifying how the cloud will feed into systems such as ServiceNow and Ansible Tower to provide us the full capability of an Infrastructure as a Service environment.  
• High Performance Compute – We are working closely with R&D to evaluate what solution we want to use in the future by running a pilot in our Lab against the two market leaders In this space. 

Once these items are complete, we will be regrouping with our WWT developer group at the ATC in St.Louis to run a hackathon-style week to live the user experience by completing application migrations of a variety of applications from different business units to the cloud, such as VM’s, twelve-factor applications and containers. This will then feed into making final tweaks to the designs to ensure that our implementation is tailored to Elanco’s use cases. 

Collab and Workplace Services – Jo Joss

ETS have hosted WWT in Basingstoke for a few days recently to work through some of the remaining items in the collaboration tooling/meeting room space. Several gallons of coffee and about a million whiteboard markers later, we’ve taken huge steps towards finishing the High-Level Designs of a collaboration minimum viable build, including: Use Cases and Personas, Call control design, Enterprise Messaging Design, Directory, and Mobility. The final items to deliver are: 

1. A set of meeting room patterns, with pros/cons of the technology recommendations and a rough order of magnitude on pricing 
2. Some analysis of our HCS/UCaaS solution?options 
3. They’ll?map resilience?for the different site types 
4. They’ll bring to the table some suggestions about outside?room booking technology 
5. Recommendations and integrations for Business Social Media 

We are also preparing to start work on the next phase, including Call centres and?print/fax.  

Productivity - Tom Burton

We’ve been focussing on 3 key areas recently: 

Migrating from Lilly’s O365 to Elanco’s O365 – this sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, not 😜 We’ve had lots of discussions in the past 2 weeks between Lilly, Elanco, Microsoft and WWT on this topic. It was mostly learning about both sides of the fence, so we can design a plan. We will be spending the next few months designing the overall transition for everything in the Microsoft world (email, calendar, OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint and so on). Our goal is to minimise disruption as much as possible, hence the reason why the planning will take some time. 

What productivity tools will we have in the future? - I know this is on everyone’s mind. As Mike mentions below, Microsoft will be a big partner for Elanco. However, we want to give you specifics. Jo has created an initial version of our key technology decisions. Once this is approved by EAC and the IT Lead team, we will share it broadly.  

eDiscovery / Legal Hold – we ran a 2-hour session with Microsoft (+ GS IT) to learn about their eDiscovery tool. It appears to hit many of the features that our legal team would need, however, next steps are to validate that.  

Program Update - Mike Henry 

There are some key program level activities happening right now that will enable us to move forward to our Build & Implementation phase of ETS. 

• IAM, Microsoft & Network/Site Cutover workshops took place over the last 2 weeks.  
• These were with Lilly to start the detailed planning at the site and application level for what cutover would look like, what roadblocks we might face and what solutions we need to think about. 
• These were incredibly complex and detailed workshops, identifying many dependencies across our foundational services.  Very encouraging start to these discussions and we will continue to work with Lilly to get the best outcome for ETS and Elanco with our key Tenets of not impacting the business and a good customer experience 
• Working on Key procurement areas with Microsoft and WWT.  
• Microsoft will be a key partner for Elanco’s future success.  However, it’s not as simple as Word, PowerPoint and Excel!  There are over 50 services/applications/tools we wish to use across ETS, IT Security, Application Services and possibly Data & Analytics too.  Discussions are underway to stand up our priority of an Azure (Cloud) environment where our Identity will live. 
• As we continue to strengthen our partnership with WWT, moving into Build and Implementation, the complexity of managing 12 workstreams over 18 months with many moving parts and decisions still to be made makes this a complicated agreement! 
• Site Cutover scheduling. 
• We are not ready to share the schedule yet until we have review and approval from Real Estate and Communications.  However, please be assured that a schedule exists, and this has enabled us to start the detailed planning of service cutovers that will be necessary on each and every site. 

Service Management – Ben Nuthak

We have finalized our requirements for a Helpdesk, Platform, and IT Service Management support managed service provider, and intend to submit these requirements alongside other ETS workstreams for RFP in the coming weeks. 

Additionally, in collaboration with Elanco IT Quality, the IT PMO, and Lilly service management process owners, we have drafted a plan to phase our IT processes out of Lilly’s ServiceNow instance.  After a final review, please expect this plan to be distributed in a formal communication with directions specific to interim execution of common ITSM processes (Change, Request, Incident management).