In Their Own Words: Single Version of Truth

Single version of truth is the wolverine of the financial data world. You hear the name a lot, but the real thing is incredibly rare.

We say “real” thing for two reasons. First, with the number of tech platforms claiming to help deliver a single version (or source) of truth, you’d think CFO quotes like this one would be the exception. But in our experience they’re much closer to the rule.

We think that’s because second, for data to deliver some truth, it has to be cleaned and monitored continuously. That’s messy and difficult work, particularly when existing systems don’t speak to each other, that internal teams often don’t have the resources to do. And that software-only third party solutions aren’t set up to do.

So we’d argue that most of what gets talked about as single source of truth (SSOT), is actually single source of data (SSOD)… an important step, but not nearly as powerful.

You can bring disparate sources of data together in a single system, and many solutions out there do. But to our way of thinking, if that data remains messy as it comes together, integrating it alone doesn’t take you much further down the path to accuracy and the confidence to really put your data to work quickly.

That’s why the focus of our work is building a platform with accurate data as true north. But who knows, maybe we’re off and there’s more SSOT out there than we think.

What’s your experience tell you? More single source of data, single source of truth, neither?

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