The fairytale that is a single source of truth
How vendors sold us clarity, executives bought theater, and the rest of us got reconciliation hell
The enterprise didn’t get clarity. It got chaos dressed up as dashboards.
We were promised one view, one reality, one blessed system where every metric aligned, every decision was data-driven, and every executive finally slept through the night.
What we got was dashboard anarchy, reconciliation purgatory, and boardrooms that sound less like strategy sessions and more like bickering couples therapy: “Well, that’s not what my numbers say…”
Welcome to the single-source-of-truth hangover.
The promise: salvation by schema
The sales pitch was seductive:
Centralize your data. Normalize your schema. Sprinkle in a little machine learning magic dust. Suddenly, the fog lifts. Finance, engineering, sales, ops—everyone speaking the same numeric language.
No more midnight Slack wars over “why the numbers don’t match.” No more executive meetings derailed by three competing revenue charts. No more arguing over whether provisioned seats equal billed seats equals active seats.
“The dream of a single source of truth wasn’t just technical. It was spiritual.”
And that’s why it sold.
The reality: a federation of half-truths
In practice?
Finance calls the ledger the truth.
Ops swears by their monitoring stack.
Marketing bows before Salesforce.
Security points to log files that nobody else can even parse.
Every team builds its own castle. Every castle defends its moat. And every castle plants a flag that reads: “We are the source of truth.”
The result is not clarity. It’s cartography. A map of overlapping territories where every border is contested.
Enterprises don’t run on truth. They run on treaties—ad hoc agreements hammered out in Slack threads, email chains, and tense “alignment” meetings.
“Truth in the enterprise isn’t discovered. It’s negotiated.”
The vendor playbook: Truth as lock-in
Of course, vendors knew exactly how to monetize the fantasy.
Snowflake insists your warehouse is the truth.
ServiceNow says your workflows are the truth.
FinOps dashboards posture as neutral referees for cloud bills, as if AWS invoices were physics itself.
Every BI suite ever waves around the phrase “single pane of glass” like it’s scripture.
But here’s what nobody’s admitting: every “single source of truth” vendor creates yet another truth.
A truth that looks authoritative in their demo. A truth that only exists inside their subscription. A truth that stops looking like truth the second you compare it against anyone else’s dashboard.
“The promise of unification always ends in fragmentation.”
Executive theater: governance without accountability
Executives aren’t innocent bystanders here. They love the fantasy as much as vendors do.
Stamp “single source of truth” on a project, and suddenly you don’t have to referee the knife fight between Finance and Engineering. You can outsource the conflict to a vendor. You can pretend it’s a technical problem instead of admitting it’s a political one.
This is why “single source of truth” projects survive downturns and layoffs. They’re governance theater. They let leadership posture as serious about accountability without ever touching the actual messy work of reconciliation.
“Truth becomes a stage prop—something to gesture at in board decks while everyone keeps their own spreadsheet.”
War stories from the data trenches
If you’ve lived through a data warehouse migration, you’ve seen the fairytale unravel firsthand.
Six months in, someone realizes revenue doesn’t reconcile between finance and sales. Cue the war room:
Finance insists revenue recognition rules must be final.
Sales insists pipeline value should drive the forecast.
Product managers swear that usage metrics are the real indicator of value.
The project burns millions of man-hours. Consultants dine out for quarters. By the end, every team leaves with their own “truth,” only now the contradiction has been institutionalized in a shiny new BI dashboard.
Or take cloud costs. AWS says one number. Azure says another. Your FinOps tool translates both into its own taxonomy, then spits out a dashboard labeled “truth.” Six months later, finance asks why cloud spend doesn’t match the general ledger. Cue another war room. This time it’s finance vs. ops vs. product. Three truths. Zero trust.
SaaS sprawl: The debris field of failed truths
The more companies chase truth, the more tools they buy.
Every “unifying” system just adds another layer of division. Every new subscription becomes a new island of truth.
This is how SaaS sprawl metastasizes:
A data warehouse here.
A BI suite there.
A FinOps platform to “translate” the cloud bill.
An AI “copilot” to summarize it all, badly.
“SaaS sprawl isn’t an accident. It’s the wreckage left behind by failed quests for truth.”
Each one promising truth. Each one delivers another half-truth in a different UI.
The political economy of truth
The real problem? Truth in the enterprise isn’t technical. It’s political.
There is no single source of truth. There are only competing narratives, each backed by incentives, budgets, and org charts.
Finance wants numbers that satisfy auditors.
Sales wants numbers that justify headcount.
Product wants numbers that validate roadmap bets.
Security wants numbers that keep regulators off their backs.
These aren’t data disagreements. They’re power struggles wearing data costumes.
“Until you change incentives, you’ll never have truth—just prettier dashboards.”
The grown-up move: Truth as contract
So what’s the alternative?
Stop treating truth like a database. Start treating it like a contract.
A contract that says:
Here’s what we mean by “revenue.”
Here’s what we count as “usage.”
Here’s who gets to define “customer.”
A contract that forces cross-team negotiation instead of pretending the answer lives in some vendor’s schema.
The grown-up move isn’t to chase the fairytale. It’s to build processes that surface disagreements, document assumptions, and hammer out agreements—even temporary ones.
Because the hard truth about truth is this: it’s never final. It’s always negotiated.
Why the fairytale persists
If the single source of truth is such a fantasy, why does the story survive?
Because it flatters everyone involved:
Vendors get lock-in.
Executives get theater.
Teams get to keep hoarding their own truths while pretending unification is just around the corner.
The fairytale survives because it’s comforting. It promises that politics can be eliminated by software. That governance can be bought as a subscription. That reconciliation is someone else’s problem.
And in a business culture addicted to quick fixes and vendor pitches, comforting lies always outsell messy truths.
The punchline
Until enterprises confront the political economy of their data, they’ll keep paying vendors to tell them bedtime stories.
And the ending will never change: another board meeting where the CFO and CTO look across the table, sigh, and ask the same question they asked last quarter.
“Why don’t these numbers match?”
The fairytale sells well. But the sequel we’re all living through? Data reconciliation hell.