Organizations these days have an abundance of data, and while the data is available to them, for the most part, they have only been able to find and utilize small parts of that data. When organizations don’t prioritize enterprise business intelligence and use siloed insights, they leave much of the data untapped, suffer from slow decision-making, and become ineffective. It may feel like analytics is coming to save the day, but only 26% of businesses from around the world report broad BI use. But only 21% of employees feel capable enough to use data appropriately.
This gap in adoption leaves organizations open to discontinuous decision-making, inefficiencies, and lost opportunities. Organizations that use enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions make decisions up to 27% faster, have 20% lower operational costs, and clearly demonstrate that integrated enterprise intelligence platforms are no longer optional – they are necessary.
In this blog, we will understand everything about enterprise business intelligence and how it benefits businesses.
Understanding Enterprise Business Intelligence
Fundamentally, enterprise business intelligence (BI) is the systems, processes, and practices that allow organizations to turn raw data into actionable insights at scale unlike departmental BI tools that provide insights for one function or business unit, enterprise business intelligence solutions are designed to provide insights by integrating data across the organization, including finance, operations, sales, supply chain, and customer service into one single source of truth.
A contemporary enterprise intelligence platform has four basic components:
- Data Collection & Integration: Integrating data from a variety of sources such as ERP systems, CRM systems, IoT solutions, and other cloud-based applications.
- Data Warehousing & Storage: Bringing together various structured & unstructured data for ease of access and consistency.
- Analysis & Modeling: Utilizing advanced analytics, predictive models, and AI-based algorithms.
- Reporting & Visualization: Presenting the entire picture through a single lens in straightforward insights across dashboards, mobile BI, and role-based reports.
With centralized data in one location and unrestricted access, enterprise BI platforms are not only eliminating the doors that silo the data in the first place, but they also provide decision-makers with access to cross-functional, real-time insights in a way that no typical BI configuration can maintain today.
Key Features of Enterprise BI Platforms & Tools
A mature enterprise business intelligence platform does more than mere reporting, empowering organizations to bridge, analyze, and act on data at scale. The features below characterize contemporary enterprise business intelligence tools:
- Self-Service Analytics and Dashboards: Allow non-technical users to analyze data and create visualizations without relying on IT.
- AI-Powered Insights & Predictive Analytics: Utilize machine learning to predict future trends, detect anomalies, and support proactive business decisions.
- Embedded Analytics: Integrate BI into business applications and workflows so insights are presented in the proper context.
- Real-Time Reporting & Mobile BI: Develop timely insights available to teams anywhere to allow quicker business decisions.
- Data Governance, Security & Scalability: Ensure compliance, protect sensitive data, and quickly scale cost-effectively as enterprise data grows.
These capabilities make enterprise business intelligence essential to organizations looking to improve their efficiency, democratize access to insights, and cultivate a data-driven decision-making culture throughout the organization.
Enterprise Business Intelligence Solutions Benefits
The use of an enterprise business intelligence solution has real value; it does much more than give you simple, ad-hoc reporting. Ultimately, by pulling together relevant data & enabling enhanced analysis, organizations gain value from:
- Faster, Smarter Decisions: Enterprise BI solutions allow leaders to be real-time informed; to be proactive rather than reactive, which shortens decision cycles and improves decision accuracy.
- Operational Efficiency & Savings: Automated reporting solutions save manual effort and provide operational savings of greater than or equal to 20%.
- Better Customer Insight: Enterprise BI solutions provide a 360-degree view of customer behavior, which can lead to personalized experiences and improved retention tactics.
- Scalability & Agility: An integrated enterprise intelligence platform – manages and scales analytics across business units, while responding to change in the market.
- Competitive Advantage: Organizations that use data to drive decisions are more likely to maintain an advantage as they relate to their peers.
Popular Enterprise BI Platforms & Tools
Some of the most notable enterprise business intelligence platforms are:
- Microsoft Power BI: One of the most adopted enterprise intelligence platform applications that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 and Azure, plus provides effective visualization and self-serve analytics capabilities.
- Tableau: A renowned application for intuitive dashboards, allowing users to be self-sufficient and to better visualize their data with a more powerful toolkit than other enterprise business intelligence platforms.
- SAP BusinessObjects: A more mature enterprise business intelligence solution that is specifically designed for larger volumes of reporting and analytics, particularly within SAP-based ecosystems.
- Qlik Sense: Offers unique aspects of associative data exploration and embedded analytics. This functionality allows for better insights across an organization’s data sources.
- Domo: A cloud business intelligence platform with a variety of strong mobile offerings and integrations into pre-existing applications for organizations with teams distributed physically.
All these enterprise business intelligence solutions offer something unique. Still, the applicability from an organizational perspective will vary according to the organization’s size, data ecosystem, and analytics maturity.
Implementing an Enterprise Intelligence Platform
Following a proven approach ensures that the enterprise business intelligence solutions have a measurable impact:
1) Establish Strategies and Objectives
Starting with methods to improve business decision speed, operating cost, and deepen customer insights is a good start. You can sometimes specify ROI metrics to track on maps from the beginning, and it is appreciated.
2) Evaluate and Integrate Data Sources
Once you identify sources of enterprise data, you can integrate ERP, CRM, financials, IoT, and applications from cloud services into one data pipeline. The efficacy of any enterprise business intelligence platform is dependent on fresh, consistent, standard, and integrated data.
3) Choose the Right Tools and Architecture
Selecting enterprise business intelligence tools must fit scalability (TI/OT), legacy infrastructure, and user skills. Consider the deployment location, and whether AI capabilities and mobile access are of concern, etc.
4) Encourage Adoption Through Training and Change Management
Ultimately, BI is about people, not platforms. Business intelligence across all its potential spans the human ability to adopt it. Teaching your employees how to use dashboards, what role-based access means, providing hands-on training, and understanding all helps BI adoption across enterprise-wide business units.
5) Measure, Learn, and Scale
Beyond tracking your objectives, such as decision-making speed, operating costs, and customer satisfaction, as well as related KPIs, be prepared to measure, learn, and scale a BI program across the enterprise. The success of program evaluation must relate to its impact.
With this roadmap, enterprises can turn a BI rollout from a one-off IT project into a long-term transformation powered by an integrated enterprise business intelligence solution.
Challenges and Best Practices
Even the most advanced enterprise business intelligence platforms can fall short if implementation challenges aren’t addressed. Common roadblocks include:
1) Data Quality & Integration Challenges
Challenge:Inconsistent and disaggregated data decreases trust in outcomes.
Best Practice: Provide data governance and put in ETL pipelines to deliver consistent data across data sources.
2) Low User Adoption
Challenge: Many large organizations cannot deploy BI at a rate higher than 25-30%.
Best Practice: Use intuitive enterprise BI tools, role-based dashboards, and continuous employee training to foster a self-service experience.
3) Scalability & Cost Management
Challenge: Additional users and organizations can significantly increase the cost and complexity of BI.
Best Practice: Utilize an enterprise BI solution that offers a flexible pricing model, tied to cloud-based licenses and usage-based pricing.
4) Security & Compliance
Challenge: The ownership of sensitive data across geographies presents inherent risks concerning GDPR, HIPAA, and other regulations.
Best Practice: Use an enterprise intelligence platform with enterprise-level encryption, controls access, and an audit trail.
By preparing with the above challenges and teams indicated for improvement, they can drive their ROI and successes of enterprise BI in a sustainable way, and future improvement systems enterprise-wide.
Emerging Trends in Enterprise BI
- AI-driven analytics: Enterprise business intelligence solutions are leveraging AI/ML to deliver predictive insights and natural language queries.
- Embedded BI: Enterprise business intelligence tools and solutions, integrated directly into applications, offer contextual real-time insights.
- Mobile & Real-Time BI: Enterprise BI is now available for mobile, connected, and dashboards are live via web browser, which speeds up decision making.
- IoT & Big Data Integration: Enterprise intelligence platforms to deliver integrated IoT streaming and large data sets together, which can be used with machine learning models for advanced analytics.
- Governance & Personalization: Many enterprise BI solutions today provide security, compliance, and role-based access control over the data set.
Conclusion
In the new data-led economy, businesses that depend on siloed reporting may struggle to catch up. After all, if two companies have access to the same data, the one with enterprise business intelligence will have the opportunity to act more swiftly and efficiently than the one reviewing and accessing data piece by piece.
Furthermore, with the ability to measure metrics across an enterprise business intelligence platform, it’s easy to show whether your business has saved costs, grown customers, or achieved a multitude of other achievements. When it comes to moving forward, a holistic, integrated enterprise intelligence platform isn’t a nice-to-have for an organization willing to move forward from disjointed tools, but a prerequisite for success going forward.
Work together with Aezion to deliver customized enterprise business intelligence solutions designed to meet the needs of your organization. Our data engineering experts will assist you with data unification and accelerate decision-making to help you scale with confidence.
Frequently Asked Question:
1) What are the 5 steps of business intelligence?
The five steps of business intelligence are: data collection, data storage, data analysis, decision making, and action. Together, they convert raw data into useful strategic business outcomes.
2) What is the difference between Business Intelligence and Enterprise Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) refers to an area of decisions based on the analysis of historical and current data, while Enterprise Intelligence takes BI one step further to make connections across data in the entire enterprise to enable real-time company-wide decisions.
3) What is enterprise reporting in business intelligence?
Enterprise reporting delivers standardized role-based reporting across the entire organization and provides stakeholders with consistent data-driven visibility into performance.
4) What are EIS in business intelligence?
Executive Information System (EIS) is a tool used in business intelligence that provides senior executives with high-level dashboards and analytics to monitor key performance indicators and make high-level tactical decisions quickly.
5) What challenges do enterprises face when implementing enterprise business intelligence?
Some of the challenges, across any enterprise business intelligence, include data siloes, reliance on poor data, integration challenges, resistance to change in user adoption, and highly costly implementation and ongoing maintenance.
