Law firm DWF selects QlikView platform "on instinct"

CTO says there was no need for a "beauty parade" of vendors after meeting QlikView at an event

UK law firm DWF has selected QlikView's Business Discovery platform to share client management information.

The firm's CTO Richard Hodkinson told Computing that he was aware of other options being on the market - including using analyst firm Gartner's magic quadrant - but that the firm did not need to undergo a full tender process, and instead went on instinct.

"We didn't do a beauty parade because I met QlikView at an event and they were easy to engage with and the products did everything they were supposed to," he said.

Hodkinson said that other products required the organisation to create a vast datahouse, but because DWF wanted to get to market quickly it needed a tool that could be deployed swiftly and ready to use.

"QlikView instinctively became the right [tool] for us, and we didn't want to waste time validating it by getting other vendors doing lots of demonstrations and spending our man hours on it. This was a little bit impulsive and very entrepreneurially led," he said.

DWF had an internal "management information (MI) pack" which gathered statistics about individual departmental performances. The law firm produced the MI package every month, about 15 days after the month ended.

"It was quite a laborious exercise and we recognised that, so the first thing to do with QlikView was to take that pain away, and we're launching [the QlikView platform] this month to about 450 to 500 people," he said.

The QlikView solution, from business intelligence firm QlikTech, has four areas of KPIs (key performance indicators) which the firm can drill into to gauge the levels of performance by department whether it be about revenue, chargeable hours or margins.

"[The solution] will reduce the effort involved in reducing the report from 15 days to an overnight activity, so we're saving a lot of time. The manpower involved prior to the new solution was of two full-time equivalents, so we'll be making savings there as those employees will be deployed into other value activities," he said.

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Law firm DWF selects QlikView platform "on instinct"

CTO says there was no need for a "beauty parade" of vendors after meeting QlikView at an event

The firm has plans to enable QlikView to be used by about 1,500 employees after the rollout is complete. The main focus, Hodkinson said, was to maintain good-quality information management, and to do this in both areas of the company - the insurance side and the commercial services side.

"On the insurance side we have an external extranet which we give hundreds of our clients access to, and it contains a lot of management information about the number of cases we're dealing with, how the cases are progressing and the commercials around them. This has all been provided in a spreadsheet style format before, but now we can re-skin all of that with QlikView - something that our very large household clients have already taken to very well," he said.

Hodkinson claimed that QlikView had enabled the firm to move ahead of its competitors because he feels it allows large volumes of data to be manipulated easily and because of its graphical representation which he feels is easy to digest.

"There seems to be an increasing demand from clients to get their hands on good-quality information in an easy-to-consume, presentable format," he said.

On the commercial side of the business, Hodkinson said that the firm is looking into ways to engage with clients in a different way, such as using a map of the UK, with the client's logo attached to it depending on where their premises are. This would then allow the client to click on the logo to open the documents of the case.

"While it is not a game changer, it demonstrates to the clients that this is a very easy-to-use interface," he said.

The firm signed up for the QlikView platform in April last year, but is only now going to launch its first application.

"The reason it has taken a lot of time is that we have gone through three sizeable mergers and this means each time we've had to install new information, we've been on a journey for the last six or seven months," Hodkinson said.

DWF aims to use the new platform for other elements of their business in the near future such as expenses, CRM and credit card transactions. It will also support the application on both iOS and BlackBerry devices.