In the past, business decisions often relied on accumulated knowledge, prior experience, or intuition. But BI tools have replaced management by gut feeling with data-driven decision-making. Business Intelligence combines – data visualization, data analysis, and reporting abilities to uncover actionable information and deliver it to managers, executives, and other business users.
BI encompasses all the methods and processes 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.
Enterprise business intelligence solutions help guide both strategic planning and operational decision-making in a company. Business Intelligence applications generate insights on processes and trends, business performance, enabling management teams to trigger down the problems and new opportunities and then take essential actions accordingly. That can result in more productive and efficient productive business operations, competitive advantages over industry rivals, more effective marketing, and ultimately, higher revenue and profits.
The strategic use of business intelligence can benefit an organization in numerous ways. From daily decision making to forecasting for the future, Business Intelligence plays a crucial role in how your organization operates and grow ultimately. And as your organization grows, you need enterprise Business Intelligence solutions that can handle the volumes of data created by more employees, scale fluidly and processes, and sales.
Components of enterprise BI environments
Reflecting current Business Intelligence trends, Gartner has characterized modern Business Intelligence platforms as easy-to-utilize systems that support the entire analytics process, from data prep to visual data exploration and insight generation, emphasizing augmented analytics and self-service. In its report of 2020 Magic Quadrant, firms have listed 15 core abilities that such platforms should involve, ranging from security, manageability, and data source connectivity to data visualization, reporting, and data storytelling.
However, there is more to BI environments than the Business Intelligence tools themselves. For instance, a typical BI architecture also incorporates internal source systems and external data sources, data warehouses and other data repositories, and various data processing and data management tools.
How enterprise business intelligence helps your corporation
Enterprise business intelligence solutions offer a higher capacity for analytics and data management. Utilizing data to create a holistic view of the business can lead to crucial efficiencies. When analytics remains project and data collection- or team-focused, essential information gets siloed, and organizations risk redundancies, inefficiencies, and potential mission conflicts between the teams. Organizations can improve and enhance performance with an enterprise approach to Business Intelligence. This approach involves data, and analytics strategies, aligning businesses, and leveraging resources and expertise.
Know how a soft drink Bottling Corporation Empowers the Enterprise
Applying an enterprise BI solution allowed Coca-Cola Bottling corporation to bring together up to 200 million data lines from 100 disparate systems into one dashboard, replacing a manual process of 45-minute at large. The new platform serves the requirements of multiple roles and audiences, from leadership dashboards that emphasize on growth and strategy to field sales dashboards with sales quota tracking and consumer portfolios. Users can swiftly answer questions like: Are projects staying within budget? Are products delivered on time? How is this salesperson performing?
Six Capabilities of enterprise business intelligence platforms
The breadth of Business Intelligence technology can make selecting an enterprise BI platform a complicated endeavor. As your corporation seeks to collect and analyze bigger and more complex data, look for the following capabilities:
Collaboration
With a huge organization, you need a corporate Business Intelligence solution that works flawlessly between departments and users. The platform should also offer a straightforward way to distribute, publish, and share useful insights—even with outbound clients. And it should be done with sheer security, without compromising your data.
Analytics
The topmost enterprise business intelligence platforms offer you the capability to make queries and answer questions instantly for strategic decision making. They also assist in power insights with statistics and advanced analytics. Not only do you get a strategic, 360 view of the data, but you can also dig into the granular details.
Infrastructure
Selecting a corporate BI platform that’s genuinely self-service and doesn’t need the IT team to assist with every inquiry that is coming over. Instead, they should look for – tools to organize resources, customizable dashboards, search functions, and revision history, so it’s easy for everyone to find the correct data every time.
Governance
Governance is one of the major capabilities of enterprise BI platforms. A centralized data source can assist in maximizing reliability, reusability, and consistency, assisting organizations to regulate reporting and offer more accurate analysis. The platform must also keep proprietary analytics and data secure while providing the proper access to authorized users.
Visualization
An interactive, easy-to-use visual interface is prime adoption across management and department levels. But ensure that the platform can curate more than just bar graphs and pie charts. It should also have the ability to provide the heat maps, scatter plots, and other data visualization methods needed for your organization.
Seamless
Eventually, your enterprise BI platform should integrate seamlessly into your current data structure and offer you the flexibility to connect to all your data on-premises or in the cloud. You should also access your data from any device or operating system, whether that’s desktop or mobile, Windows or Mac.
Final Thoughts
Organizations who are looking out to stay on the correct side of digital disruption must get serious and fast about their data and analytics activities. While much of the data analysis today is entirely based on historical data, the focus is swiftly shifting towards automated data-driven decision-making. As the BI landscape is soon going to be defined by trends around data governance, self-service BI, prescriptive analytics, NLP, BI-as-a-Service, and collaborative and integrative BI, organizations must embrace these trends and strengthen their foothold in today’s competitive and dynamic business environment.
At Polestar Solutions, we help enterprises simplify their complex data workflows at every step of the BI Journey with a modern, scalable platform for enterprises. With us, you can empower business teams to adapt to changing demand and act on insights faster.