Single source of truth: Definition, Benefits and Implementation

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What is a single source of truth?

The world today runs on one thing that binds all the entities together. It is nothing but “DATA”. When it comes to businesses that are highly or even slightly data-driven, it becomes crucial to pay attention to the quality of the data that is being let into the organization and how it is used. Many firms face the same data-driven difficulties when it comes to outsourcing the data, quality and accuracy of the data that is being used by the teams.

To make sure the business decisions are being made correctly and based on one shared source of data, the companies should make sure the outsourced data is a single source of truth to the organization. A single source of truth or SSOT is a technique used to determine that the organization is using a single source of data to make all the important decisions.

It just becomes more important when we are talking business intelligence and data science. With the emerging technologies, data becomes even more of a crucial business driving force than ever before. Brands use this data to build business decisions after running the source data through various data science mechanisms.

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In an organization with various teams working together, it is a bit challenging when it comes to keeping one shared source of data and making sure all of them refer to the same. Single source of truth works by making sure all the teams and departments provide access to their information for the company.

SSOT then jots down the primary location of the data storage and collects and integrates the information coming from all sorts of sources to that one primary location. The project management teams then work further to perform data operations on the gathered data and create one integrated data centre for all the teams in an organization to build their decisions on.

Why is a single source of truth necessary?

SSOT provides one single data source for all the departments in an organization.

It makes sure that the business decisions are being made based on common data.

SSOT ensure the standardized working of the organization.

Business leaders can make business decisions for the organization as a whole.

SSOT takes data from various areas of an organization like sales, customers, marketing, production and integrates it into one single data source.

SSOT also eliminates redundant data entries.
It also minimizes the time constraint that takes to identify the correctness of the data.
In the end, SSOT also enhances the business intelligence qualities of the organization.

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How to carry out a single source of truth in your organization?

Following are the steps to implement a single source of truth for the first time in your organization:

Data requirements

As we know there are various teams working together in an organization, you would want to determine what kind of data all the cross-functional teams will be needing. This is mostly done by the IT team. They can go around asking for the nature and specifications of the data they will want to make their business decisions.

Data gathering

After you know the nature of the data you need, you can start the data gathering process. In case you have a broad field of data that is covering a vast area of information, you can go ahead and divide those into smaller sets that will best represent their business operations. One thing you need to make sure of is that the gathered data is measurable.

Buy-ins from project teams

Talk and get your project teams to come together and have the shared data access points to determine the incoming data. This way you won’t need to have participant buy-in.

Compliance

Make sure the data organization and accessibility are not compromised. Your SSOT workflow needs to be smooth and compliant. Any damage to that can cause organizational compliance norm disputes.

Make data accessible

When the process is almost done, the last thing to do is to finally give the data access to all the cross-functional teams. Make sure the teams are tracking the project discussions and decisions and sharing them at one point for easy evaluation.