IMHO “the enterprise” is an extremely pretentious-sounding expression.
Not really. It's an Economic designator which distinguishes a particular class of businesses from all other classes of businesses.
The Enterprise: consider it an organization which meets most of the following criteria:
- A business which offers products or services across multiple geographic locales.
- A business which as a business strategy involving discrete departments or organizational units, each with their own objectives.
- A business which has multiple components, but while each organizational unit of the business may have individual budgets, collectively, the business' financial resources are shared.
- A business were those individual units' Information (KPIs) are shared across organizational units.
- The business has a diverse set of clientele which they cater to. Despite offering different products or services, the business caters to these clients as a singular organization.
That sounds pretty complicated, doesn't it? Here's another definition: a huge business.
An Enterprise level business will have several clients with physical locations numbering in the thousands, whom serve hundreds of thousands of customers on a weekly basis, or have thousands of employees, some of whom will never cross paths even once during their entire careers. Another "symptom" of what makes a business an enterprise is the inevitable large bureaucracy involved when an organization reaches this scale.