“Single source of truth” is the kind of phrase that wins meetings. Nobody is going to argue for multiple sources of confusion. But the slogan obscures a question worth asking: truth about what, for whom, at what latency?
The finance team’s view of a customer is correct, on a monthly cadence, for the purpose of revenue recognition. The growth team’s view of the same customer is correct, in real time, for the purpose of campaign attribution. They will never agree, and they shouldn’t have to. The mistake is forcing them into a single representation that satisfies neither.
Mature data organisations don’t pursue one truth. They pursue a small number of well-governed perspectives, each fit for a specific purpose, with explicit lineage between them. The discipline is in the governance, not the unification.
If your data programme has spent two years trying to reconcile two systems and is no closer than when it started, the problem may not be the systems. It may be the goal.
Alex
