What Is Enterprise Business Intelligence (BI)? Definition, Uses, and Capabilities
The strategic use of business intelligence (BI) can benefit an organization in many ways. From day-to-day decision making to forecasting for the future, BI plays an essential role in how your company operates and ultimately grows. And as your company grows, you need a BI platform that can scale fluidly and handle the volumes of data created by more employees, processes, and sales.
What is enterprise business intelligence?
Business intelligence encompasses all the processes and methods of collecting, storing, and analyzing data from business operations to provide a comprehensive view of a business. The most basic enterprise business intelligence definition is the deployment of BI throughout a large corporation. Larger, more complex companies create more data and require more extensive and sophisticated business intelligence platforms. Enterprise BI helps these organizations increase productivity and efficiency.
How enterprise business intelligence helps your corporation
Enterprise business intelligence platforms provide a higher capacity for data management and analytics. Using data to create a holistic view of the business can lead to critical efficiencies. When data collection and analytics remains project- or team-focused, essential information gets siloed, and companies risk inefficiencies, redundancies, and potential mission conflicts between teams. Companies can improve performance with an enterprise approach to BI. This approach involves aligning business, data, and analytics strategies and leveraging resources and expertise.
Coca-Cola Bottling Company Empowers the Enterprise
Implementing an enterprise business intelligence solution allowed Coca-Cola Bottling Company to bring together up to 200 million lines of data from 100 different systems into one dashboard, replacing a daily 45-minute manual process. The new platform serves the needs of multiple audiences and roles, from leadership dashboards that focus on strategy and growth to field sales dashboards with customer portfolios and sales quota tracking. Users can quickly answer questions like: Are products delivered on time? Are projects staying within budget? How is this salesperson performing?
What are the capabilities of enterprise business intelligence platforms?
The breadth of BI technology can make choosing an enterprise business intelligence platform a complicated endeavor. As your organization seeks to collect and analyze bigger and more complex data, look for the following capabilities, and learn more in our Evaluating a Modern BI platform whitepaper.
Collaboration
With a larger organization, you need a corporate BI solution that works seamlessly between users and departments. The platform should also provide a straightforward way to publish, distribute, and share insights—even with outside clients. And it should be able to do all of this securely, without compromising your data.
Analytics
The best enterprise business intelligence platforms give you the ability to ask and answer questions immediately for on-the-fly decision making. They also help power insights with advanced analytics and statistics. Not only do you get a strategic, top-view look at the data, but you can also dig into the granular details.
Infrastructure
Choose a corporate BI platform that’s genuinely self-service and doesn’t require the IT team to help with every inquiry. Look for customizable dashboards, tools to organize resources, revision history, and search functions, so it’s easy for everyone to find the right data every time.
Governance
Governance is an essential capability for enterprise BI platforms. A centralized data source can help maximize reusability, reliability, and consistency, helping you to regulate reporting and provide more accurate analyses. The platform must also keep proprietary data and analytics secure while providing the right access to authorized users.
Visualization
An interactive, easy-to-use visual interface is key to adoption across departments and management levels. But make sure the platform can create more than just pie charts and bar graphs. It should also have the capabilities to provide the heat maps, scatter plots, and other data visualization methods needed for your organization.
Seamless
Finally, your corporate BI platform should integrate seamlessly into your existing data structure and give you the flexibility to connect to all your data on-premises or in the cloud. You should also be able to access your data from any device or operating system, whether that’s desktop or mobile, Windows or Mac.
Corporate BI is evolving
Finding an enterprise business intelligence platform with the right capabilities is essential to using your data efficiently and effectively. But corporate BI is continually evolving, so also choose a platform that makes innovation a priority. Learn more about enterprise BI and how it can with in IT in our overview of Enterprise analytics powered by IT.