Far too many companies struggle with data-related issues such as organizing multiple data sources, lacking collaboration between teams, low data accuracy, and poor data accessibility. To get worth out of your data and acquire accurate results, you must ensure that all decision-makers have convenient access to the same data. And that’s only possible if data is consolidated and is in a unified repository. This single source of truth supplies stakeholders with a clear view of the enterprise assets and the potential difficulties that can disrupt the data strategy.
What is a Single Source of Truth?
SSOT, or Single source of truth, is a philosophy for gathering data from across the company and aggregating it into a central repository.
The companies that succeed at this use a single source of truth to keep business leaders and decision-makers on the same page while lowering the odds of unwanted overlap and duplication, giving them a competitive advantage.
Advantages of The Single Point of Truth Approach
Introducing a single point of truth provides companies with many advantages. As a result, this data management concept has become a standard with the increasing importance of reliable data for successful business operations.
Reduce costs:
If departments maintain unnecessary databases, this not only ties up excessive working time, but the complexity of the IT infrastructure also grows, and the maintenance effort increases. For example, the larger the data pools, the higher the costs of providing and maintaining sufficient storage capacity. However, if companies consolidate their data in a golden record, hardware, maintenance, and opportunity costs can be significant.
Break down data silos:
When data is only available to individual business units, it lives in a data silo. Implementing SSOT principles permits an organization to act with the confidence that it has not neglected a dependency or trend when shifting in strategy.
Increase productivity:
Using an SSOT approach, team members cannot pull data from multiple sources to build reports. As a result, analysts and stakeholders spend less time collecting data and more time finding new insights and coming to conclusions.
Eliminate duplicate data:
Without an SSOT, separate teams may track the same information without realizing it. SSOT removes the risk of exact data for more efficient storage resources while ensuring both groups have access to this information. This data integration also prevents teams from drawing different conclusions if one dataset is more recent or complete than the other, which improves data quality.
Improve Insights & Decision-Making Process:
The less effort it takes to obtain valuable data, the more likely employees will use the option in their day-to-day business. In addition, teams benefit when they can include data from other regions or branches in their analyses and forecasts. Especially for companies with multiple locations or subsidiaries, a golden record containing customer data from all countries can be worth its weight in gold for marketing activities.
Conclusion
By implementing a single source of truth across your entire organization, you will be confident knowing that all business decisions are based on the most valuable data. Moreover, you will drastically decrease the burden on your IT teams to wrangle data for corporate choices they don’t understand.
The data integration tool you select must be adaptable enough to offer the flexibility of constructing the solution incrementally as circumstances demand, allowing for recurrent changes and future additions.
Do you need help implementing a single truth source across your business? At BCH Group, we are experts in this field, so give us a call to discuss your needs.
