Case Study: Linklaters
Reporting Solution Increases Visibility of Information for Law Firm Employees
In line with its strategy for market leadership, international law firm Linklaters wanted its partners and managers to be able to analyse business performance faster and more effectively. The existing SAP solution produced reports suitable for the firm’s power users in HR, Finance, and Marketing, while other employees had to rely on improvised reporting techniques for insight into the business.
Employees can now view reports of the rich data contained within the company’s SAP system and share them across the organisation. This gives managers much greater insight into the company’s success and the people who drive it.
Situation
Linklaters is a law firm that specialises in advising the world’s leading companies, financial institutions, and governments on high-level transactions and assignments. With offices in 23 countries, the company has 540 partners worldwide and more than 2,000 lawyers covering 18 core practice areas. These include capital markets, competition and antitrust, tax, mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property, and technology.
Innovative use of technology has contributed significantly to its success. The company’s corporate strategy aligns IT with its business objectives, and it aims to give all employees access to applications and software, wherever they might be.
In 2004, Linklaters launched a market leadership programme that set out its strategy to become the world’s leading law firm. The firm has since won many awards, including Global and Asian Law Firm of the Year at Chambers Global Awards 2006 and Thomson’s Project Finance International magazine’s Global Law Firm of the Year in January 2007.
In late 2006, Linklaters project managers recognised that employees would benefit from a more accessible and user-friendly view of management information. While the existing SAP Business Warehouse solution met the requirements of power users, other employees in the firm had to improvise to create management information reports.
Michelle Abell, Project Manager at Linklaters, says: “Our business intelligence system needs to cater for different audiences. The SAP solution is suitable for the power users within the organisation who require reports with a high level of detail. But we also wanted our partners and lawyers to be able to access a more user-friendly view of what’s going on in the business.”
Abell and her team decided to look for a solution based on the balanced scorecard methodology of Professors Robert Kaplan and David Norton. The concept measures a company’s activities in relation to its vision and strategy to give managers a comprehensive view of the business. In addition to examining financial outcomes, the balanced scorecard concept focuses on the human issues that drive these outcomes.
Solution
The team considered business intelligence solutions from Business Objects and Cognos, but was attracted by the simple implementation process offered by Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005. Linklaters already employed the solution as part of its database environment and saw using Reporting Services as a natural progression. With these technologies, Linklaters could build a comprehensive business scorecard to help the company measure its performance through key performance indicators.
In August 2006, the company engaged Microsoft Gold Certified Partner IMGroup to develop the business scorecard. IMGroup was named Worldwide Partner of the Year for Technology Innovation in Business Intelligence Solutions by Microsoft in 2005–2006.
Linklaters worked with IMGroup on an initial pilot to examine the potential of the business scorecard. During this time, they confirmed that the initial scorecard could be developed using the enhanced features of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. The team also found that data subsets from the SAP system could be arranged in online analytical processing cubes, which help users view and analyse information in multiple dimensions. Abell says: “The proven expertise of IMGroup in business intelligence helped us to develop an excellent business scorecard solution within a very strict timetable.”
The scorecard aligns with Linklaters’ strategy for market leadership, incorporating four perspectives: clients, financial, work, and people. A set of criteria was agreed for each perspective. For example, the “client” perspective measures chargeable time spent on international premium clients and international premium client billings. The “people” perspective examines offer/acceptance ratios of employees, appraisals, and employee retention.
During the pilot, Linklaters migrated data from the SAP solution into SQL Server 2005. Tim Warburton, Information Systems Strategy Consultant, Linklaters, says: “We’ve noticed that, since moving the data from SAP into SQL Server 2005 analysis cubes, we have been able to manipulate it in new ways, which makes many tasks easier.”
With this technology, Linklaters has also moved from hard-coded applications to a more flexible Microsoft Application Platform. Developers have used these tools to deliver an integrated and information-rich solution. Employees have switched from using disparate data silos to an integrated data management platform, which drives efficiency and gives them real-time insight into the business.
Following a 10-week development of the business scorecard, Linklaters users were impressed with the simplicity of the design and implementation process. “It was very easy for us to design the front end,” says Abell. “It was an iterative design process involving lots of feedback, which resulted in a user interface that met everybody’s requirements.”
The scorecard was introduced in November 2006, and employees across the organisation were impressed by how easy it was to use. “The reception to the balanced scorecard was tremendous,” Abell says. “Users are enthusiastic about seeing more reporting information and management information in this format.”
Benefits
With the solution’s seamless integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, which supports the Linklaters intranet, employees can analyse performance—from a corporate-wide perspective down to the practice group level. Managers and partners are using the accurate, well-presented information in the balanced scorecard to make more informed decisions during the business planning process.
Project Team Creates Easy-to-Tailor Solution
Linklaters’ project team designed an intuitive scorecard that presented salient management information to partners and managers. “It was a very quick process to write, design, and deploy the scorecard,” says Abell. The team found that the flexible and user-friendly functionality of Reporting Services played an intrinsic part in the smooth development of the scorecard. And developers were able to work instinctively due to features such as the familiar user interface of the Report Builder, which operates in a similar fashion to products in the Microsoft Office system.
Suranjan Som, Principal Consultant at IMGroup, says: “We realised that Linklaters needed a solution up and running within a very strict schedule. We applied a mixture of Microsoft technologies, methods, and expertise to deliver a robust and scalable scorecard framework.”
Partners and Managers Make Informed Decisions Faster
While the information displayed in the business scorecard was always available to employees, it was not presented in the optimum format. The business scorecard solves this problem by presenting large amounts of information in a way that can be understood quickly. Partners and managers now use the scorecards to gain critical insight into the business. For example, they can identify the highest-performing fee earners at a glance and check their retention levels. Most importantly, they can pre-empt any potential issues before they become problems.
Using the scorecards, employees can concentrate their efforts on making informed business decisions rather than spending their time on trying to pull together the information required. “I think the solution is going to bring huge benefits,” says Abell. “Employees won’t always have to go to their business managers when they require information. They’ll be able to have a quick look themselves and see how their business area is performing.”
The Linklaters project team is currently developing two management information projects. Its members are creating a business manager’s dashboard that will provide a daily overview of what’s happening in the practice area. They’re also developing an operational reporting tool that partner managers will use to review business area performance on a monthly basis.
Global Access to Management Information for Employees
Due to the seamless integration between SQL Server 2005 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003, managers and partners can disseminate management information easily. “The intranet offers the ideal centre for distributing the scorecards to employees and means the project team can focus on developing optimum scorecards, rather than on how they deploy them,” says Abell.
Linklaters employees can access the scorecards through the intranet wherever they are. They can collaborate and work together on single documents, share ideas, and accelerate workflows, while reducing the inefficiency and expense of distributing paper reports.
Improved Performance of Existing Solutions
Linklaters plans to use the enhanced integration between its SAP technology and SQL Server 2005 to expand its management information, while making the most of its existing IT investment. Abell says: “Using Reporting Services, employees can access business data and content in its SAP solution and condense previously monolithic reports into accessible business scorecards.”
They will also be able to use the query designer in SQL Server 2005 to create SAP-compatible queries of their own. This will save the company’s power users time when interpreting and presenting data to other employees. As a result, these users will be able to focus on more complex, strategic tasks.