Remarkable business outcomes
In a world awash with data, Qlik prides itself on delivering real-time data intelligence. Qlik solutions enable enterprise customers to turn raw data into remarkable business outcomes. For this to happen, Qlik strives to be integrated and egalitarian. Smart data must be within reach of any skill level. Qlik wants to be actively involved in exploring its own data.
Qlik takes the same approach with its in-house applications. It is happy to adopt the best of what’s available but doesn’t ever want to lose the appetite for creating its own applications.
Creating custom-built applications
Qlik likes to emphasise the importance of integrating data into a business. “Customers are at the centre of everything we do,” says Alayna Cohn, Director of IT Service Delivery & Management at Qlik. “Our processes are geared around selling our software and supporting our customers. Over the last few years, we’ve made a really big push in terms of support.”
In a competitive market, the challenge for Qlik is to ensure customer support is flawless. It wants issues to be dealt with quickly, and that all departments—from Finance to R&D to sales—are connected and in the loop. For Qlik customers, support should be a singular experience.
“We’ve been building custom applications for seven or eight years,” says Alayna. “We now have 20 across all operational support teams. We’re happy to spend the time creating these applications, but we need their impact to bring value to the business.”
Managing applications from one platform
Qlik’s custom applications are built on ServiceNow App Engine. The platform creates a digital workflow across processes, connecting departments and streamlining production. The business uses 20 custom applications, involving 280 users and on average 19,000 requests a month.
“Almost all of our backend support can be managed from the platform,” says Alayna. “We can transfer tasks between different teams or departments, track progress and apply consistent security rules. We can move issues along simply by reassigning them. In fact, the more we put into the ServiceNow Platform, the easier it becomes.”
The impact has been stark: HR estimates time savings of 35% on issue resolution; accounts payable has eliminated email requests through an online portal; and Qlik has achieved a cost avoidance of $162,000 in licensing costs since moving marketing operations to a custom app built on App Engine.
Alayna says the IT Service Delivery team has “ten or eleven projects on the go, with five or six on the waiting list”. Her team has to assess the merits of any new custom application proposal before dedicating time and resource. It may work on three custom applications in a year.
“We’re always looking to get more value from the App Engine platform, but we’re very careful with our build, test and deploy strategy,” she adds. “Right now, the focus is on building an end-to-end on- and off-boarding application.”
A platform for ongoing development
The engagement with ServiceNow goes beyond App Engine. The ServiceNow Platform is in broad use across Qlik, covering ServiceNow IT Service Management, ServiceNow IT Operations Management and ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management. On any given day there are 115 IT users on the ServiceNow Platform, says Alayna. The platform helps to orchestrate Qlik’s IT function.
“Many of our custom-built applications have since been superseded by ServiceNow applications,” she says. The original adoption of ServiceNow stemmed from a need to address a specific ITSM issue. Even at that stage, it was clear the ServiceNow Platform offered more.
“ServiceNow had a vision unlike any other vendor. We could see then the opportunities for involving other parts of the business.
“We’ve learnt from other SaaS deployments that you can customise too much. The beauty of ServiceNow is it’s out-of-the-box ready. We didn’t try and import anything old, implementation has been easy, and we’ve always updated to the latest version.”
Supporting remote working with mobile
Qlik is now looking to use the ServiceNow support app to track cases and changes. Alayna says this mobile-first approach is now in Qlik’s plans: “Our next big project will be to develop our own mobile app based on the ServiceNow experience. These days everyone is working off their mobiles, or remotely, whether that’s field sales or product support.
“We’re just exploring the different requirements from different parts of the business—voice transcription or one-touch ordering of IT equipment. We’ll then prioritise and start work.”
Long term, Alayna expects the engagement to deepen. The ideal would be for all departments, and all processes, to work off a single platform, she says: “That’s the power of ServiceNow.”