Page 93 - Performance Leadership

Chapter | 6

ONE VERSION

OF THE TRUTH

The more a business term is connected to the core business, the more
definitions of it will be around.

In the Kingdom of Truth, Context Is King

Since the advent of MIS (management information systems), the “Holy
Grail” has been to create a single version of the truth: a single set of
reports and definitions for all business terms to make sure every man-
ager has a common understanding of accurate corporate information.
In the last 20 to 30 years, countless projects have been started to iden-
tify all these different versions of the truth. These projects then try to
collapse these different versions into a single definition so that all busi-
ness departments can align themselves with the crucial business term.
In other words, these projects are trying to apply vertical alignment to
the problem.
Rarely have these exercises been successful. It’s no wonder as they
have been misguided. The reason why all these versions of the truth,
often under the same name, exist in isolation is the vertically aligned
setup of the management structure. Each business domain only reports
up, and most of the reporting is “self-reporting,” the domain reporting
is based on its own data. At the same time, apart from political reasons
of not wanting to align, there is a reason there are multiple definitions
of common business terms such as revenue, number of employees, and

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