Enterprise Business Intelligence

Enterprise business intelligence is the process of analyzing the data of an organization to discover significant trends and factors that can drive the business.  Enterprise business intelligence aims to uncover pieces of information or "key performance indicators (KPIs)" that highlight information that would otherwise not be apparent to decision makers.  Properly used, enterprise business intelligence can be helpful at strategic, tactical and operational levels.  The process of implementing an enterprise business intelligence solution can be very time consuming and requires close coordination between multiple departments.  This complexity in deployment is the key reason why enterprise business intelligence projects suffer extremely high failure rates and are often completed behind schedule and over budget.

The Need for Enterprise Business Intelligence

Enterprise business intelligence, provides answers to the classic 5 questions: Who, what, when, where and how.  Enterprise business intelligence, however, can also provide clues to the sixth question "why."  Enterprise business intelligence relies on vast amounts of data and can be performed with tools as simple as a spreadsheet and as complicated as custom built enterprise business intelligence suites.  For larger organizations one of the first problems to decipher is "what data" to use in the analysis process.  For this reason many enterprise business intelligence deployments rely on a tool known as a "data warehouse."  A data warehouse is simply a collection of key data that the organization feels is critical to enterprise business intelligence.  The reason for using a data warehouse in an enterprise business intelligence deployment is two-fold: first is the concern of over-tasking production data bases, the second is the need to analyze the "right" data vs. all the data.

The Reason Behind the Data Warehouse

The first reason for deploying a data warehouse in an enterprise business intelligence solution has to do with placating IT requirements.  Because enterprise business intelligence involves a heavy amount of reading and writing data to and from tables, the organization that is tasked with supporting a company's internal systems (ERP, accounting, CRM etc.) often has grave concerns of the impact an enterprise business intelligence system will have on database performance.  A data warehouse acts as the central core of the enterprise business intelligence operation to avoid this problem.  The data warehouses collect data from multiple systems and are updated on a pre-determined schedule (like at night) to ensure minimal impact on the affected systems.  The second purpose of a data warehouse in an enterprise business intelligence deployment is a tougher one to identify.  Specifically, the systems that are analyzed by enterprise business intelligence often contain hundreds if not thousands of fields and tables.  Understanding which fields in each system is important for analysis purposes is a tricky operation and one that is at the core of a proper enterprise business intelligence deployment.  Properly mapping which fields should make up the data warehouse is one of the toughest challenges in an enterprise business intelligence deployment and is at the core of some of the delays and failed implementations often associated with enterprise business intelligence.

Alternatives to Enterprise Business Intelligence

While enterprise business intelligence has been widely deployed in large multi-national organizations, many smaller companies, even so called "small to medium enterprises" have shied away from large enterprise business intelligence deployments relying instead on purpose built, department level applications that are either bundled with their systems or a low-cost add-on.  For this reason enterprise business intelligence companies are beginning to release products that seemingly go counter to an enterprise business intelligence deployment, but that are more likely to be adopted by smaller organizations.