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?

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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.

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.