Eli Lilly & Co has a team of 150 ethics and compliance people around the world, tasked with the mission of driving the integration of high performance and high integrity. Led by Melissa Barnes, chief compliance officer and senior vice president of enterprise risk management, the team launched two key initiatives in 2017: a smartphone app that summarizes the firm’s policies and procedures for employees, and a big-data compliance tool that enables the team to better understand and prioritize the risks they face around the world.
The company markets its pharmaceutical products in 120 countries, so its employees have to understand the laws and regulations that apply in those jurisdictions. ‘We wanted to make it easier for our employees to get answers to questions [on high-risk issues] that come up often in their daily work,’ Barnes tells Corporate Secretary.
The team felt a smartphone app could be effective, but had heard about other companies struggling to get employee buy-in for such tools. To solve this problem, the team formed a focus group in late 2016 to get a better sense of what information employees need, how that information should be organized and how it should be delivered. The results convinced members of the team that building a smartphone app was the right move.
It took nine months to build the app – called myIntegrity – before the team tested it in Canada. The team has spent extra time customizing the content and language for each country the app has launched in, taking eight months to launch a Japanese version, for example.
‘We’re a global company based in Indianapolis and we’ve been focused on localizing the information,’ explains Chris Fletchall, senior adviser for ethics and compliance at Eli Lilly. ‘In terms of localization, we try to stick to the 70/30 rule – where 70 percent of the content is global, high principle-based, and 30 percent is based on local requirements.’
The compliance team’s other big innovation this year was the creation of its ‘seven elements dashboard’, which tracks real-time data from 19 sources to paint a picture of where there could be risks or opportunities to recognize good work. Each quarter, the company’s ethics and compliance officers update the system to ensure the data is current. ‘There’s a defensive piece to this work in that it helps us establish our effectiveness across our compliance program,’ Barnes says. ‘But it’s also a great management tool. It’s already helped us to identify power users and best practices.’
The next step for Barnes and her team is learning more from the data they are gathering, such as how, why and when employees are using the myIntegrity app, as well as extracting highlights from the seven elements dashboard to inform decision-making. ‘Data analytics is crucial in terms of how we can make ourselves smarter and use finite resources in the best way,’ Barnes says.
This article originally appeared in the Winter issue of Corporate Secretary.
Ben Ashwell
Ben Ashwell is the editor at IR Magazine and Corporate Secretary, covering investor relations, governance, risk and compliance. Prior to this, he was the founder and editor of Executive Talent, the global quarterly magazine from the Association of...
