What is "One Version of Truth” for a Data Warehouse

One version of truth or single version of truth (svot) has been a popular vision for data warehouse developers in many years. Large organizations tend to put one version of truth as a major milestone in the implementation of a centralized data warehouse. So, what does "one version of truth" mean? Is it achievable?

First of all, one version of truth means that all enterprise data are consolidated into a single data warehouse. The data is kept in a consistent and non-redundant way such that all data coming out from the data warehouse should be understood as the enterprise's common view of information. For example, if there are minor differences in the organization hierarchy data in different business area, the data from the the data warehouse should be considered as the correct, commonly-accepted, and enterprise-wide agreed organization hierarchy.

In many cases, the interpretation of single version of truth is extended so that one can have a "federated" view of different versions of truth in the single data warehouse. This implies that the data warehouse tends to give the governance of certain business logic away in order to maintain the view of “centralization" in a technical level. I think Malcolm Chrisholm's article "there is no single version of the truth" is in fact quite valid in the real data warehouse world. The only way to achieve a "single version of the truth" is to have the agreement and governance process on the business level.

However, when you manage to let all business to agree on almost everything of the organization's data, are we losing the power of being different and being able to think out of the box? The basic nature of a successful business is that people try to work out innovative ways and new concepts or new views of old things.

In my point of view, one version of truth is achievable in certain sectors, such as the military section and the public sector. In an enterprise where it is important to make business innovations and improvements, one version of truth sounds more like a thing in the road map... ...