What Is Enterprise Business Intelligence (BI)? Definition, Uses, and Capabilities

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.

Additional Resources

Business Intelligence or Business Analytics

Why you need a BI platform and how to choose one