Why did your firm choose BigHand Business Intelligence?

Well, we were already using a couple of other BigHand products, but we had moved over previously to Elite and needed sort of an upgrade on our business reporting.

We had been using sort of various forms of data, but none of them were really giving us what we needed. BigHand Business intelligence actually did give us what we needed in terms of usability, and something the lawyers were able to use without too much complication and very simple.

The other reason was the cube, and the ability for us to be able to pull reports from that very easily and then just build them forever. That was something that really made a huge difference to the financial planning analyst team as well. That was the main reason.

What benefits has the firm seen from the technology?

Initially we went and used a lot of the standard partner KPIs, but we moved very quickly to using dashboards for business impact. The first dashboard they land on now is their matter lead dashboard. Up front and center is their WIP and their AR. We use that to drive billing and enhance performance from the business.

We're also using some of the white space analysis reports that we have built. We built previously in the cube and then moved them across into into the dashboards as well. That's allowed us to look at clients and say, "is there opportunity for more penetration across sort of various different practice groups and businesses in the business?" That's been very useful as well for us.

How helpful is the solution in recognizing matter realization?

Extremely. We've moved on a little bit from that sense where, although realization is really important metric for us and it allows partners to very quickly see what clients are good or bad, or what matters are good or bad, in terms of realization - we've moved more towards profitability now.

We actually use realization and profitability in conjunction with one another and that's been very successful as well. They can drill into and start looking at how they resource jobs and jobs maybe where we need to go back to the clients and say, "Look, we need to do something here, because we're just not able to make money on what we're doing for you." It's been very helpful.