What is Enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) + 5 Tools for 2025
What is enterprise business intelligence?
Ask most organizations if they want to become more data-driven, and the answer is likely yes. Businesses have started prioritizing data and analytics more as new, powerful technologies emerge and the landscape evolves faster than ever. Yet, the reality of creating a data-driven cultureis far easier said than done.
23.9 percent of executives reported that their companies have built a data-driven organization, down from 31 percent four years ago, according to Harvard Business Review’s 2023 research on data, analytics, and AI investment. Having no business intelligence (BI) tools is a major barrier to creating a culture that values data and insights. For large enterprises, this goal is even more difficult to achieve, simply because they have so much more—and more complex—data to analyze compared to smaller businesses.
Because of this, enterprises can’t rely on standard BI tools. Instead, they need to implement more extensive, sophisticated BI tools to improve productivity, efficiency, and overall performance.
So, what is enterprise business intelligence, and how is it different? Put simply, enterprise business intelligence is a type of software that provides large enterprises with insights into their customer and employee data. The software differs from traditional BI solutions in that it can gather, analyze, and report on the large, complex data produced by an enterprise.
When implemented, enterprise BI software can help businesses:
- Make better, more informed decisions that are backed by data
- Identify where operational costs can be reduced
- Improve business processes
- Increase competitive advantage
- Understand customer needs and industry trends faster
Organizations who only use BI tools for individual projects or teams—rather than taking the tools enterprise-wide—risk creating siloed data, process inefficiencies, or conflicts between teams. By relying on enterprise BI tools, organizations can avoid these potential roadblocks, align business and data strategies across teams, and optimize performance.
What are the key features of enterprise BI platforms?
Enterprise BI platforms have extensive capabilities, which can make choosing one a complicated endeavor. As your organization evaluates various platforms, these are the capabilities you don’t want to be caught without:
- Search analytics: Search capabilities are a critical feature for enterprise BI platforms; the best ones should allow users to ask questions and find answers using natural language queries. This capability allows users to quickly and easily delve into business data and uncover actionable insights without needing much technical skill.
- AI-powered insights: AI and machine learning technologies can provide your team with smart recommendations based on search queries, patterns, and behaviors. This can help users quickly identify data trends, anomalies, or correlations that may have gone unseen otherwise.
- Self-service options: Gathering and analyzing data shouldn’t be a job solely for IT personnel or developers. Instead, look for platforms that include self-service data tools that allow anyone, regardless of their technical skill to use data to ask and answer questions.
- Visualizations: Data visualization tools help make data more digestible, an essential feature for enterprises sharing data with non-technical teams. Visualizations such as bar charts, pie graphs, and tables make it easy to represent data and quickly understand the trends and patterns.
- Data governance: The amount of sensitive and confidential data enterprises have makes data governance and security a must for organizations. Look for platforms that provide security features such as role-based permissions, audit trails, data lineage, and more—these features help keep enterprise data safe and secure.
- Data integration: Your data likely lives in multiple places, meaning you need a platform that can centralize all your data in a single place. From data warehouses to the cloud, enterprise BI platforms need to have data integration capabilities to easily gather and access data without having to switch platforms.
- Collaboration: Data is meant to be shared. Look for BI solutions that allow users to share insights, collaborate on reports, assign tasks, and more—all in real time.
- Data management: An enterprise BI tool should automatically explore, blend, prepare, and clean data without interference from users. This saves users from having to perform manual data management and instead focus on more pressing tasks—like acting on data insights.
- Predictive analytics: For enterprises to remain competitive in today’s dynamic business world, they need to be prepared for the future. Predictive analytics relies on machine learning, artificial intelligence, statistics, and data mining to analyze current and historical trends to create accurate forecasts.
- Mobile BI: Mobile BI capabilities enable users to gather, analyze, and report on data from any device, including smartphones and tablets. The feature should provide users with on-the-go access to data insights, business KPIs, customer interactions, and more to make intelligent business decisions from anywhere.
Benefits of using enterprise business intelligence tools
The ability to make smarter, better informed enterprise decisions is only the beginning of what enterprise BI tools can offer. BI tools can also help increase productivity and streamline processes. Together, these tools provide your enterprise with an in-depth look at how you’re performing and where opportunities lie.
Additional benefits of enterprise BI tools include:
- Better decision-making: Decision-makers get accurate, up-to-date data, enabling them to make more informed decisions faster.
- In-depth business insights: Company productivity levels, revenue losses or gains, and employee performance are critical insights uncovered by enterprise BI tools. With this information, leadership can stay up-to-date on key metrics, KPIs, and overall performance.
- Increased efficiency and productivity: With a 360-degree view of all company processes, leadership can quickly identify operational issues or where processes can be streamlined. This ultimately makes the business more efficient and productive.
- Higher customer satisfaction: The customer insights uncovered can help organizations quickly identify critical patterns and trends in customer behavior; ultimately this helps them to better serve and delight customers.
- Higher data quality: Enterprise BI tools automate the process of gathering and cleaning data, providing users with clean, accurate data they can trust.
Best enterprise business intelligence (BI) platforms
The top enterprise BI platforms enable organizations to find and report on key business insights with ease. To ensure you’re partnering with an enterprise BI platform that will simplify—not complicate—data science and analytics, take a look at five leading platforms currently on the market:
1. Domo
A cloud-based business management suite, Domo accelerates digital transformation for enterprise-level businesses with an intuitive data experience platform. The platform offers self-serve reporting, interactive dashboards, embedded analytics, app creation, data governance and security, and data storytelling capabilities.
2. Microsoft Power BI
Power BI is a scalable, self-service BI platform that enables users to connect to and visualize all business data. The cloud-based platform includes data reporting capabilities, interactive dashboards, and data integration.
3. Tableau
Tableau is a data visualization and analytics solution that helps organizations make data-driven decisions. The platform’s data integration and reporting tools gather information from across the enterprise and deliver actionable, real-time insights.
4. Looker
A web-based analytics solution, Looker enables businesses to easily explore, discover, and report on data insights. Users can easily drill into data visualizations to better understand business performance and metrics and share insights across teams.
5. Qlik
Qlik is a data analytics platform that enables businesses to explore and analyze their data. The platform offers visualization tools, real-time data integration, and analytics capabilities. With features like self-service data preparation, interactive dashboards, and collaboration tools, Qlik supports both enterprise-level and self-service BI needs within organizations.
An enterprise business intelligence platform is the key to unlocking critical business and industry insights. These tools let decision-makers quickly make sense of large or complex data and make smarter, more strategic decisions that add business value. Additionally, the tools can increase productivity, reduce (if not eliminate) data errors, lower costs, and improve customer experience.
When choosing an enterprise BI platform, carefully consider the features being offered. Ensure the platform has the reporting, visualization, security, and collaboration capabilities you need to be successful. The right solution will easily democratize data, seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack, and empower (not hinder) your business users.
Enterprise business intelligence FAQs
Have more questions on enterprise business intelligence or how to choose the best platform? We’ve got you covered. Find answers to the most commonly asked questions about enterprise business intelligence below:
What is enterprise business intelligence?
Enterprise business intelligence is software that uses data analysis and tools to give organizations greater insight into their business. It helps organizations improve decision-making, increase productivity and efficiency, create more accurate sales forecasts, and more.
What are the four concepts of business intelligence?
The four components of business intelligence include data mining, process analysis, performance benchmarking, and descriptive analytics. Combined, these concepts enable businesses to create easily digestible data reports that improve business performance.
What are the major types of business intelligence?
Three of the main BI types include predictive analytics, descriptive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. Predictive analytics involves taking historical and current data and forecasting future needs. Descriptive analytics is the process of using data to identify trends and relationships between historical and current data. Prescriptive analytics analyzes all business data to determine the next course of action for businesses.
Is ERP a business intelligence tool?
No, an ERP is responsible for gathering enterprise data, while business intelligence tools analyze and present the data in an easily digestible way. Essentially, an ERP is designed to collect and organize data while BI tools (including dashboards and other interfaces) to review and present data in a way that makes sense.