One source of truth: untangling operational data

The meeting about whose number is right

It is a familiar scene. Two teams arrive with two reports. The revenue figures differ by four percent. The next forty minutes are spent debating whose spreadsheet is correct, and the decision the meeting was for gets postponed. Multiply that by every week and every metric, and fragmented data stops being an IT annoyance and becomes a management cost.

How data fragments

• The same fact is captured twice. A client's details live in the CRM, the billing tool, and a spreadsheet - and drift apart within a month.
• Transformations live in spreadsheets. Every analyst applies their own filters and adjustments, so no two “revenue” figures are computed the same way.
• Definitions are tribal knowledge. Does “active customer” include the one who paused last month? Depends who you ask.
• Nobody owns the pipeline. Reports are assembled by hand, differently each time, by whoever has capacity.

What actually fixes it

Capture once, at the source. Every fact should have one home. Everything else references it rather than re-typing it.

One pipeline, not many exports. Data should flow from source systems through one governed transformation into the reports - the same logic for everyone, versioned like code.

Write the definitions down. A short metric dictionary - what each number means, how it is computed, which system it comes from - ends most arguments before they start.

Make the trusted path the easy path. People fall back to spreadsheets when the official report is slow, wrong, or missing the column they need. The trusted view has to be more convenient than the workaround, or the workaround wins.

The payoff

None of this requires exotic technology. It requires deciding that numbers are infrastructure. When the business trusts its own figures, meetings change character: less arguing about the data, more deciding with it. Give the business one source of truth, and decision speed follows.