Introduction – Mike Henry
It is important to continue to look externally and not bury our heads in the sand even whilst so busy. We are not the first or only company to have experienced Divestiture or large transformations in short periods of time. To that end, the ETS team have been open to meeting with reference customers and listening to those who have experiences to integrate external thinking into our own plans. I would encourage everyone to maintain an external focus, even when it seems your calendar is full - it will be worth it! One of the key takeaways I have from one customer reference was a motto they used to help their organisation think in the right way.
Never been done before is a reason to go ahead, not a reason to stop
I think this fits ETS and the broader Elanco really well and is a great mindset to have when looking at how we transform our organisation, our applications and our culture as we become a New Elanco.
As always, we hope you enjoy the update and please don’t be shy asking us any questions or feedback on the ETS – Ask Us Anything Teams channel. We’ve also begun building out this channel to provide additional information, the following pages can be seen on our ETS information page:
Your ETS Friends.
Network - Paul Graham
As we begin to finalise the design phase, it is important that we take the steps to ensure our high-level assumptions are able to translate into the expected outcomes. It is tempting to think the of “clouds” that providers use to describe their services as amorphous, and rely on the promise of reliability, however to deliver on the business requirements, we will ensure that we understand the physical basis of the technology and get an in depth view of how the service promises are going to be kept. In the networking area, there are hardly any components more critical than the interconnection with SAP, so we have been holding design and architecture reviews with the product teams involved in the end-to-end delivery of this service, which have all proven very useful and given us greater confidence in our chosen partners.
There has been a flurry of activity in the Telephony area as well over the last week. This is another fundamental service that must meet the demands of our differing environments with the flexibility to map to all of our colleague personas, no matter where we are in the business. As always, there has to be a close eye on balancing the cost of the solution with the complexity, usefulness and future-proofing to allow integration of new services such as the contact centres. We’re trying once again to tread the fine balance between price, business need, geographical restrictions and user experience, looking at options ranging from Cell Phones only, through to implementing a MS Teams front end with direct routing and a full UCaas system in place. We have completed the initial cost analysis that shows our unified comms as a service (UCaaS) proposal would be significantly cheaper than a simple Teams + Cell phone option.
Cloud - Calum Bell
The Cloud Hosting Patterns are now available in the ETS –Ask Us Anything Channel file library. Before reading, application owners should first work to fully understand their applications. Owners should then review the Cloud Hosting Patterns guidance and use the decision matrix to find a recommendation. This should allow owners to take action.
The ETS – Ask Us Anything Channel decision table has been updated now for both Cloud Decisions and Identity Decisions.
We now have our own Microsoft tenant including Azure and O365 and have full access to it. We are now beginning work to set up our core environments within the tenant.
Identity – Calum Bell
We have now down-selected to the options for the Elanco.com tenant migration which we are planning to share with Lilly at the end of next week. This will be the precursor session to workshops which we are having with Lilly in the week of the 20th.
Due to the nature of the tenant migration, we are involving all other workstreams in the decision-making process to understand how it might affect each area.
Collaboration and Workplace Services – Jo Joss / Ellie Burn
- At long last, we’ve procured 300 Zoom host licenses! We will shortly be able to provision these in 4 countries, for internal use only. We hope to work closely with the privacy team to scale this out so we can include more use cases in the very near future.
- Data, data, data! Our friends at WWT are trawling through thousands of rows of data in excel spreadsheets from Lilly to help us make decisions in the End User Compute and Mobility space. We’re currently trying to establish more details about what devices, apps and needs users have, in order to start planning the core build of each device and what individual personas need in their day to day work.
- We have received further proposed meeting room templates from WWT and are waiting for the final designs after giving our feedback. We are planning on having templates for small, medium and large meeting rooms as well as some additional exception equipment which will advise on unique circumstances. The challenge here is trying to ensure that the proposed templates and equipment meet the need of every site but will still offer the same standard experience. We are aware that some sites have certain requests or needs, and these are being considered. Another aim is to try and reuse all kit we have where possible, especially if it is already new. The aim and main message for the new meeting room designs remains the same: we want to provide a good user experience which is simple and reliable, as well as ensuring all costs are necessary. In terms of meeting room booking panels/ management we have decided that this is out of scope for initial deployment as this is not a feature heavily implemented in Elanco today.
- ETS also had a session whiteboarding the future of SharePoint. This is an area of high complexity. The main thing we want to avoid is site sprawl, where sites are created and abandoned with no clear clean-up process. However, we also understand that SP is used in our business and there are some critical sites which sit on the platform. We see the divestiture as an opportunity to clean up our SharePoint landscape, and to change the way we utilise these services, to be more effective. We will be working through the list of sites we currently own on Lilly’s SharePoint instance and will be analysing the need and usage. Matt Cronin has been helping us with this, and with his SharePoint knowledge, has categorized sites by complexity (taking criteria like work flows and InfoPath into consideration). Site owners have been contacted in this process and we will be using all the information on our current SP state to assess what we do going forward. Our discussions and findings will allow us to decide what happens to Elanco SPO in the future.
Print/FAX - Simon Bartlett
- I am working with our partner WWT defining high-level designs from the base data we have had back so far from Eli Lilly. To review future state services.
- Fax capability will need to be retained globally for limited use cases. WWT are also working on the High-level design for this service.
ETS Support Vendor RFP – Adam Fussey
- The short-listed vendors are in the process of finalising their RFP submissions having received responses to their questions earlier this week. We are expecting full RFP responses late this week/early next.
- A panel of Elanco and WWT staff will review the responses, assessing them against a scorecard with a view to down-select to 2 vendors to present their proposals in person in Indy w/c 13th May.
Service Management - Ben Nuthak
- ServiceNow has been selected as the employee portal, the combined landing page for IT Services, HR, Ethics and Compliance, Communications, Corporate Affairs, and others. Anytime an employee says, “I need …” they will begin here.
- Application and service owners – it is critical that you include a request for a fully-baked Knowledge base in your RFPs. We will not be migrating the Lilly IT knowledge articles, as those are based on the routing of incidents – our knowledge base will be intended to prevent incidents in the first place. When you engage in RFP discussions with any service or application support vendor, they must be expected to bring knowledge articles with them and place them into the Elanco ServiceNow instance. They must become Elanco’s intellectual property immediately so they cannot be extracted during a vendor exit.
- Similarly, please stay tuned for a post regarding Enterprise Service Levels. We want our customer base to expect a standard, tiered service level (including measurement for Customer Satisfaction) regardless of which service or application their incident/request targets. We have an open request to WWT to produce a contracting template to enable more efficient, standardized contracting with technical MSPs. However, until that is produced, I will be placing the Service Level Agreement breakdown in an area viewable by all of IT very shortly in order to level-set on expectations spark dialog.
Site Migration – ETS & WWT
Next week most of ETS are attending a two-day Pilot & Release 1 Site Migrations Planning Workshop for two days in London at the WWT offices. We’re going to be working through some of our first moving site scenarios with representation from each of the workstreams. And that’s just in the afternoon and evenings! In the mornings we’ll be attempting to tackle the small task of the Microsoft Tenant Migration. We’re hoping to come out on the end of the second day with a clearer picture of the risks, issues and approach to our first sites!