HEAD: ELVIS rocks on at Lilly & Co.
During the past year, more and more Eli Lilly and Co. employees have been turned on to ELVIS. It can even be said that ELVIS plays a crucial role in how the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company runs its global operations.
ELVIS is the Eli Lilly Virtual Information System, the intranet that began as a grass-roots movement to apply Internet technologies internally and was so effective it earned Eli Lilly cowinner status in Network World's 1996 User Excellence Award competition.
ELVIS now appears to be coming full circle. Although it started as a grass-roots effort, eventually the Information Technology group stepped in with funding, organizational skills and operations expertise to equip ELVIS for a rapidly expanding role. But now the IT experts are taking a back seat, so the business units can start exploiting ELVIS as the primary means for 30,000 employees around the world to find, access, collect and share information.
"ELVIS has been integrated into the fabric of the corporation," says Ed Tunstall, information officer, global infrastructure. "Since the infrastructure was put in place, the big move has been that the company has just gone off and been using it."
From the outset, ELVIS' appeal to Lilly's 30,000 employees has been the ease with which it let them access, gather and share information. Repeatedly, users told Network World that timely access to specific information made them more effective in their jobs.
To facilitate this increased use, the IT group in 1997 installed an intranet search engine from Verity, Inc., and set up mechanisms to backup and recover files on the ELVIS Web servers.
The new search engine reflects the reality that ELVIS is still mainly about accessing or reading information. So far, Lilly has not yet begun to apply transaction processing technology that would let users make changes to their human resources address information or 401K investment portfolio.
Looking ahead to 1998, Tunstall says the IT group is looking at reversing the read-only information flow to some degree using push technology, which sifts and sends specific information to groups or invidivuals. An IT team has started weighing the costs and benefits of creating a Web information broadcasting service based on a product such as PointCast, from PointCast, Inc.
Tunstall says IT also will continue a program of upgrading servers, optimizing performance and managing the Intranet's growth. "We locate these intranet servers along with the rest of our important corporate servers and treat them the same way," he says.
"This [intranet] is not a toy anymore," Tunstall says. "We're treating ELVIS as something that's business-critical."
