Due to a much-needed public holiday in the UK, we’re bringing you our transition update a day early! As always, we hope you enjoy the update and please don’t be shy with any questions or feedback on the ETS – Ask Us Anything Teams channel.
Your ETS Friends.
Network – Paul Graham
We have been working to complete the final design for the interconnection with our new SAP delivery partner, Virtustream. We need to balance the desire to simplify our architecture, which leads to better service uptime and easier support, against the physical location of the connections (in either of our Colocations in Ashburn, VA or Amsterdam) to give the best user experience.
In a similar vein, the contracts with our Colocation hosting provider, Equinix, were finally signed, allowing us to begin the physical infrastructure build process. These sites will be the nexus of the new Elanco network, where we host our private cloud infrastructure as well as where our public cloud providers will connect.
Another design challenge we are working to overcome as we build our “Internet-first” connectivity strategy is how to take advantage of Microsoft’s regional Internet architecture to give our users the best performance from the Office 365 ecosystem. We need to bring the benefits of local service name resolution, which allows a user to reach the Office 365 service via the shortest path, along with our plan for a centralised DNS (domain name service) system; more to follow on this…
Identity – Calum Bell
Whilst we wait for our Microsoft Tenant to be stood up, we have shifted focus to address the complex challenge of the tenant migration from Lilly to Elanco. At its core, this problem is essentially that all O365 applications rely upon the @elanco domain to operate and moving that will mean some impact to the end user. To solve this we have pulled together a team of industry experts from WWT whose focus is solely on this problem, we have identified five feasible options which we are looking to evaluate with our Enterprise Architecture Community and then discuss with Lilly. We are working through our last high-priority contract with RSA which we are hoping to have complete by the 25th April, which is the last critical requirement for our August 1st deliverable.
Cloud & Automation – Calum Bell
We are actively working on preparing for the delivery of our Microsoft Tenant and setting up the domains which each will use. We are also preparing for the environment set-up, which we have accelerated by designing IaC (Infrastructure-as-code) scripts to ensure our environment is consistent and secured.
The next iteration of our Application Migration Playbook (previously Hosting Patterns) was released this week. This document outlines the future hosting patterns which will be available in Elanco, recommendations on how to move applications and the implications of choosing one architecture over another. We are intending this to be a document which evolves throughout the transition to support application owners migrate their apps.
As discussed in our last update we have now confirmed the week of May 13th to run a full week of hackathon activities to do some sample application cutovers. Toward the end of that week we will be bringing a few individuals from each area of the business in for some Cloud training so that they can help champion application strategy within their own area.
In the Automation workstream we have been working very closely with the Service Management team to ensure that we are building towards the same goals. Primarily we’re focused on the user experience of deploying infrastructure in different ways without creating unnecessary complexity.
Collaboration and Workplace Services – Jo Joss/ Ellie Burn
Conversations around meeting rooms and their future state have continued, with some research into the current scheduling and booking solution including the interactive panels which are used on the outside of the rooms to ‘Quick Book’. We have had a demo from Teem which is a meeting room management system and will continue to investigate other vendors for this purpose to establish whether the replacing this capability is feasible. Again, it’s a careful balance between budget and user experience. More investigation around technology within meeting rooms is needed, with some exploration into the different hardware we currently have across our estate.
In terms of digital signage, we have been working on understanding the Zoom offering, and will continue to work to understand if it is a solution which can meet our requirements. We now have the requirements and technical specification for the large conferencing/ webinar solution to replace ON24 and will be working with Mark Gibson and Zoom to understand if it could also be a solution for this capability.
We reviewed the first draft of the End User Compute and Mobility High Level Designs last week and smashed through a few of the major decision points with our partners at WWT. We’ve submitted several data requests to Lilly, to gather more information about application use. By understanding what the common applications are utilised by each user group we can map personas for the low-level designs, and better plan what will happen during the migration phase.
We also spent some time talking about what a Minimum Viable Build would look like for our 1st of August delivery date – balancing what is realistically achievable in the time frame, but also what is an absolute must have to keep the business running. We’re in an interesting situation with some of the technologies we’re considering for mobile device management are evolving so rapidly, that there’s a possibility that they will have new features by the time we come around to implementing, allowing us to consolidate our portfolio even more. So, we almost need to have a Plan A, a Plan B and a Plan C in the works simultaneously.
Print Photocopy Fax – Simon Bartlett
I am working with our partners WWT to investigate the current print and fax usage in Elanco and we need to formally request more Eli Lilly data. Alongside this I am reviewing the print scenarios we have in Elanco, WWT will then review options beyond the current Xerox implementation.
For fax I am gathering information across the business for use cases we have today to align to possible future state.
ETS Managed Service Provider Selection – Adam Fussey
This week we’ve distributed an RFP to a list of vendors to provide IT Helpdesk, End-user and InfraOps services globally. Vendors have been asked to respond within 3 weeks, at which point we’ll kick off an accelerated shortlisting and selection process, looking to onboard the successful vendor in time for the first site migrations in August.
Service Management – Ben Nuthak
Timeline: The Elanco ServiceNow will go live for Elanco IT beginning August 1, and for the broader enterprise on January 1, 2020. Between those dates, the various migrating sites will go live in their entirety at the time of site cutover. These sites will give the Helpdesk their first iteration of support, and will give us opportunities to analyze adoption, user acceptance, and known issues to adjust prior to Jan 1.
CMDB: We are planning to source as much regulatory and support info (Classifications of GxP, SOx, Privacy, criticality, ownership, and support) straight from the sources via localized metadata, then targeting Discovery and Ansible to pick up the metadata from the various sources of truth to auto-populate as much as possible, along with the existence of our assets. For any non-discoverable data, a service catalog item will allow secured updates to CI metadata without requiring owners and support groups to go into ITIL view (process user view) to edit a CI. Discoverable fields will be locked. This drastically reduces our licensing requirement.
Discovery: ServiceNow’s Discovery function will be paired with Red Lock, Forescout, Intune, SCCM, Ansible, Solarwinds, Ariba, and ATP to populate the CMDB. Due to the overlap of discovered CI data, ServiceNow will reconcile the various sources and prioritize sources of truth on the fly.
Helpdesk: The Helpdesk will be accountable for reconciling Elanco vs Lilly services when Incidents and Requests roll in. Tickets targeted at Lilly services will be swivel-chaired to the Lilly system, and the Elanco Helpdesk will oversee their fulfillment in partnership with the Lilly Helpdesk.
Incidents: We’ve provided Alcor with a list of all YTD Elanco Incidents. They’re running a correlation analysis against this list to advise the Helpdesk during KT.
Service Catalog: We’ve provided Alcor with the 15 most common Service Requests that Elanco has submitted to Lilly YTD. They’re building these Catalog Items into the Elanco Catalog and will swivel-chair these directly to Lilly. The other ~44% of Elanco requests of Lilly services will be managed via a standard, service-agnostic catalog item through the transition period. A Catalog Item will be created for various Elanco services to request their own Catalog Item creation, which the SNow MSP will create, then charge back to the requesting cost center.
Site Cutovers
We are actively engaging with Lilly to align on our cutover approach. We have in the past had a significant disconnect, but in recent weeks we’ve have begun to find compromises across the organizations on some of the cutover issues.
Our Partnership agreement with WWT has now enabled a Site Cutover work stream to be formed. We are in process of bringing that team up to speed on schedule and helping them to better understand the Elanco environment.
We have developed a draft cutover schedule that has been vetted by the IT Advisors and Directors. Currently we are reviewing this with key business leadership. At the IT town hall in March we were able to share a Quarter-by-Quarter granularity of this plan, but now we have reached a great level of detail and are working Month-by-Month. We’ve identified initial pilot cutover locations (pending approval) in Zone 1, 2, and 3. These will be the first to cutover and leverage the new Elanco network in Q3.
We have also identified initial site cutover discovery visits to occur in Q2 (KC, Wusi, and Yarrando). These will be working sessions to develop a cutover framework for our medium complexity, Manufacturing and R&D sites. Site discovery visits will eventually occur at all manufacturing and R&D locations.