A Cornucopia of Benefits
Once an organization balances local requirements with enterprise standards, it reaps a multiplicity of benefits that enhance individual performance and boost corporate productivity. Specifically, an enterprise BI solution provides the following key benefits:

  1. Delivers Consistent Information. In an enterprise BI solution, all business users work off the same set of metrics and reports, which become a common vocabulary for the organization to make sound, rapid decisions. Executives no longer have to watch the business become paralyzed by a cacophony of conflicting data. The enterprise BI tool relies on this consistent information rather than replicating its own version of the truth.
  2. Improves Communication. When everyone works off the same information, meetings run more efficiently. No one spins the data to protect their turf, because everyone has access to the same data at the same time. Meetings focus on refining strategies, creating plans, and solving problems instead of refereeing disputes about the data.
  3. Saves Time and Money. An enterprise BI system frees up the time that analysts and managers previously spent collecting and integrating data into their own conflicting reports. Many organizations have justified an entire BI projects on the money saved by liberating analysts and managers from functioning as "human data warehouses" and by consolidating redundant analytic silos. BI purchasing is centralized to leverage volume discounts, and development, support, and infrastructure costs decline overall.
  4. Enables Fact-based Decision Making. With consistent, easily accessible information, users no longer have to rely on intuition and gut feelings to make critical decisions and plans. Now, they can validate or refine their intuition with facts and projections gleaned from consistent data, make smarter decisions, and devise better plans.
  5. Provides Actionable Information. An enterprise BI solution delivers the right information to the right person at the right time. These systems blend historical and event-driven data so users get access to information in a timely fashion. This enables users to intervene to fix problems or exploit opportunities before it's too late.
  6. Aligns the Business. Actionable information empowers business users to work more efficiently to achieve strategic and tactical objectives and optimize performance. Dashboards and scorecards focus workers at all levels within an organization on the objectives and metrics that drive the most business value and compare performance to targets and thresholds devised in planning tools."

Enterprise Business Intelligence, Strategies and Technologies for Deploying BI on an Enterprise Scale, Wayne Eckerson and Cindi Howson, August, 2005 available at Bitpipe