Hello everyone, welcome to another edition of the ETS transition update, covering news from our key work streams over the last two weeks. We hope you find value in the content, and please reach out to us at the ‘ETS – Ask Us Anything‘ Teams channel if you have any questions or want to request updates on a specific topic. This Microsoft Team should be accessible to everyone in Elanco IT (Please request access if you work in IT and you are not already a member!)
We hope you enjoy the update,
Your ETS Friends
Network - Paul Graham
Over the last two weeks we have been finalising the proposal for our future telephony environment. Rather than the traditional, and expensive to support, on-premise type solutions, we will be proposing a design that will bring the power of Microsoft Teams together with Unified Communications as a Service. This is a cloud offering that has the scale to service our international footprint and allow us to bring our telephone numbers with us, if we are moving offices (TSA permitting). The next step will be to discuss this solution with the Enterprise Architecture Community to ensure that it will meet the requirements of the business.
The Segmentation workshop spanned two very productive days, hosted at WWT’s London Canary Wharf office. The outcome is that we have the foundation of a highly flexible security design that will allow us to offer new approaches to the S95 type manufacturing designs as well as novel connectivity options for integrating with our third-party ecosystem, which we expect will simplify and speed up business processes in the future. This will need further development before it can be presented.
As our work streams develop, we are keeping a close eye on maintaining the integration between them all; this becomes increasingly difficult as the complexity of the solutions necessarily builds up. Next week, we will start to solidify the detail of the interfaces between the workstreams and look to map out the RACI matrices for them.
Identity – Calum Bell
We have been working to provide different business groups clarity regarding how they should consume SSO during our transition period and the way they will be able to consume workforce data in our future state via the GIR (Global Identity Repository). The key interface which we are focusing on is between Lilly’s cSAD and Elanco’s Master Identity Management System solution which will be our first key source system during the transition.
We have just finished onboarding many of our new WWT staff to ensure that they are fully briefed and prepared to begin implementation, alongside this we have just solidified our working practices as we move forwards with the development stage.
Cloud – Calum Bell
Within Cloud we are beginning to work towards a Hackathon week in May during which we are aiming to do some initial training and bring some simple applications into the new environment, living the end user experience to identify where we may want to modify our process’ and architecture. These applications will be surfaced by the ADDM (Applications Data Dependency Mapping) workstream who are interviewing application owners to understand more about the detail of the applications.
Alongside the Cloud story, we are also evaluating what our HPC capability will look like in the future, to ensure we get the best experience, we are working very closely with R&D to run a pilot in both Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure via WWT’s ATC (Advance Technology Centre). The outcome of this pilot will be two key metrics:
- Cost/Time
- User Experience
This outcome will help us identify which platform we want to utilise as our primary HPC solution in the long-term.
Alongside all of this, our automation team has begun writing the “plays” for infrastructure deployment, these are the short scripts that allows our Ansible Tower to deploy linked infrastructure within Azure.
Collaboration – Jo Joss
The collaboration space has been focused on finalising the new telephony solution this week. You can find out more in Paul’s update above. This final design work will be fundamental for us to move on to services which rely on telephony, like our contact centres, and fax/print services.
Our newest team member, Ellie Burn, has begun working through some questions around digital signage, live broadcast capabilities, and meeting room equipment.
Workplace Services – Jo Joss
The Workplace Services team spent this week reviewing the high-level designs for what End User Compute will look like and how mobility will be managed. We’re working through several decision points, deciding how to balance a good user experience, keep our IT kingdom secure, meet the TSA timelines but also stick to a sensible budget. Easy, right? We’re looking to utilize as much of the Microsoft stack provided in our license package, but as a lot of this technology is evolving quite quickly we need to ensure it meets the needs of the enterprise and integrates with other third-party solutions. There’s a lot more to consider here than simply hardware specifications – we’re looking at:
- Hardware, Application and OS Build Provisioning
- Managed vs Unmanaged devices
- Connectivity
- User Experience and Brand
- Data Access
- Security
- Support
- Monitoring and Analytics
- Decommissioning
This piece of work overlaps with pretty much every other IT workstream - site cutovers, O365 migrations, application dependency mapping, network, collaboration. We’re whiteboarding to try and understand how to provide users with Elanco-build devices, without disrupting their day to day work. This means allowing them to reach the applications they need whether they are on the new Elanco network from day one, or those applications that might live for a time on the Lilly network. We’ve got to plan the actual delivery and rollout, but also any additional training and communications. It’s complex, but we’re making progress, and we’re about to bring on a team of WWT consultants to help with Adoption Services, covering important topics like OCM and education, making sure we’re setting everyone up with what they need for a smooth transition.
Productivity – Tom Burton
The first version of the HLDs (High Level Designs) for productivity were completed this week. The HLD is intended to set the direction, confirm the technologies required to meet our needs, indicate how the technologies will integrate and meet Elanco’s security principles.
The majority of our productivity needs will be met by Office 365 products (e.g. Outlook, OneDrive, Office Online, OneNote, Stream, PowerApps and more).
We will move into the LLD’s (Low Level Designs) next! This will be achieved by having WWT onsite a few days a week for the next few weeks, lots of whiteboarding and coffee ??