Why It's Important to Have a Single Source of Truth Across All Your Enterprise Data

Data has become the force driving today’s business strategies, which means data isn’t just for data scientists anymore. Whether your role is finance, sales, marketing, IT, or customer service, access to consistent, reliable data is a critical factor in your ability to do your job effectively and make strategic decisions.

In larger organizations, data has a tendency to become siloed within departments, which affects data integrity and diminishes the value of that data to the enterprise at large.

As more organizations become reliant on the cloud, the negative impact of siloed data is compounded because it reduces productivity, increases compliance risk, and limits understanding of business performance.

To overcome these challenges, many enterprises are opting to centralize their data and create a single source of truth that feeds the same standardized, validated data into all of the organization’s business systems.

Let’s take a closer look at why implementing a single source of truth is critical for today’s data-dependent enterprises.

Why Enterprises Need a Single Source of Truth

Creating a single source of truth improves enterprise master data quality and integrity by:

• Eliminating duplicate data.

• Reducing errors.

• Increasing accuracy and consistency.

• Improving collaboration and productivity.

• Providing access to the right data at the right time.

• Creating transparency and accountability.

• Optimizing storage resources.

When the entire organization uses the same information, there are fewer errors and inconsistencies that can lead to poor strategic decisions, inaccurate data analysis, and missed business opportunities.

The Challenges of Creating a Single Source of Truth at the Enterprise Level

Although there are many benefits to creating a single source of truth for enterprise data, there are also many challenges to navigate.

Integration Complexity

Enterprise-level organizations often depend on a complex network of business systems, including customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and corporate performance management solutions. 

Integrating these systems so they are able to share data can be technically challenging due to compatibility issues and legacy software.

Data Migration

In highly segmented environments, moving data from multiple sources and departmental silos is often time-consuming and labor-intensive without the right tools.

Data Governance

Designing and implementing a data governance strategy is a crucial part of creating a single source of truth. A governance framework will define the ownership, access, and management policies needed to ensure data accuracy, security, and compliance.

Buy-In for Process Changes

It can be difficult in enterprise-size companies to get buy-in from leadership to make a major process change like consolidating all of the organization’s data into a single repository. Arm yourself with data and real-world success stories to build a powerful business case for the initiative.

Single Point of Failure

A security event or system failure could potentially impact all of your organization’s master data. Additionally, latency issues, poor network connections, and excessive traffic could cause performance bottlenecks that affect accessibility.

EPMware Helps Enterprises Maintain and Secure a Single Source of Truth

EPMware’s unified master data management and data governance platform helps enterprises create a single source of truth by providing accurate, accessible, and trustworthy master data across all of their business systems and target applications.

Here’s how it works:

Audit-Friendly Workflows and Change Requests

After implementation, EPMware becomes your central master data management and data governance hub. This is where all master data operations are managed, executed, and monitored. EPMware’s audit logs provide traceable visibility and insight into who ran what, where, when, and how, which eliminates audit concerns for the change management process.

Data Standardization and Rationalization

EPMware’s out-of-the-box integrations ensure all of your master data is standardized and rationalized for your specific target applications prior to deployment. Real-time validation capabilities provide confirmation that a request deployed successfully—and if it failed, why. These safety nets provide peace of mind that data is accurate and consistent across all of your business systems.

Visibility into the Master Data Request Process

EPMware’s dashboard allows business users, managers, and application administrators to monitor the status of change requests in real time. You can follow a request from the initial creation stage through its review, approval, and deployment stages. A graphical representation of each request's status in the workflow allows users to identify bottlenecks in the request process and decide whether an escalation is required.

Do you trust the data driving your business decisions?

As data continues to dominate enterprise business intelligence and decision-making, you can’t afford to take your chances with data accuracy and integrity.

Implementing a master data management strategy will create a single source of truth for your data so you can be confident that everyone in your organization is using the same high-quality data to drive strategies, analysis, and business processes.

Want to learn more about how master data management helps enterprises create a single source of truth?  Check out A Practical Guide to the Master Data Management Process.