What Is a Single Source of Truth? How To Implement SSOT

Good metrics are gold, whether you’re a company of one or a growing brand. But capturing metrics and important insights is one thing—understanding what they mean while hopping between data silos is another. When your data is scattered across multiple platforms, using those insights can feel less effective.

This is where a single source of truth (SSOT) comes in—and yes, it can be a simple solution to a complex problem. Here’s how to implement an SSOT with insight from Raven Gibson, founder of fashion and accessories brand Legendary Rootz. 

What is a single source of truth?

A single source of truth (SSOT)—also known as a golden record or master data—is a centralized hub used for collecting, managing, and analyzing important business information. A single source of truth consolidates data from multiple sources. It allows data access to everything like sales, service, and marketing records in one place.

For example, a brand with both an ecommerce site and retail or wholesale channels might use multiple systems to manage customer data, inventory, and order fulfillment. Rather than analyzing separate batches of location-specific data, consolidating information into a single source of truth provides a clearer picture and allows the company to make sales and logistical decisions based on a comprehensive view of all the data available as it pertains to a customer.

Principles of SSOT

Here are the main principles of a single source of truth:

• Centralization: Centralization is at the core of a single source of truth—the “single” in SSOT. All data is stored and analyzed in one centralized location. Depending on the size of your team and the scope of your data, this might be as simple as a shared folder or a cloud-based task management hub like ClickUp or Asana.

• Accessibility: An SSOT ensures all team members have access to the same view of the same data, eliminating silos, so no department acts as a gatekeeper of important information due to complexity, technical barriers, or access.

• Regular audits: An integral part of an accurate SSOT is a regular auditing process, which promotes data accuracy and allows for data updates.

Benefits of a single source of truth

1. Efficiency
2. Trust
3. Security

A single source of truth helps keep your entire organization on the same page. Here are three concrete advantages that come from this alignment: 

1. Efficiency 

From small, isolated tasks to large, interconnected ones, much of your daily workflow can be streamlined with a single source of truth.

Take onboarding a new hire, for example: HR forms, IT permissions, and departmental workflows all need to be managed. The same goes for short-term or seasonal hires, whose access must be revoked when their contracts end. With an SSOT in place, these processes can be automated and synchronized, instead of leaving each step to individual stakeholders, avoiding bottlenecks and siloed information. 

2. Trust

There’s a level of organizational trust that comes with relying on a single authoritative data source. Not only that, but an SSOT minimizes inconsistencies across various systems by eliminating duplicates and reducing human error stemming from manual data entry—ensuring more trustworthy, accurate data.

3. Security

Consolidating your data into one secure and comprehensive location reduces the number of potential vulnerabilities and makes it easier to implement protective tactics like intrusion detection, firewalls, and access controls. 

Establishing rules around who can access which data is a key piece of data governance, the organizational guidelines that dictate how you manage and protect your company’s data, and guarantee its quality and accuracy throughout its lifecycle.

Implementing an SSOT also helps businesses stay on top of data security regulations, like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which ensures businesses handle cardholder data securely while processing payments, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which stipulates how customer data must be collected and stored, by making it simpler to track how you view, manage, and access the same data across departments. 

Challenges of a single source of truth

• Technical expertise
• Companywide adoption
• Regular maintenance

Even when establishing an SSOT is the obvious choice, some friction is natural before everything clicks into place. Here are a few common hurdles:

Technical expertise

Smaller teams without in-house IT specialists may find SSOT implementation a little daunting, depending on the scope and scale of data you’re looking to consolidate. 

You might consider hiring an SSOT-specific consultant who can walk you and your team through the process and provide training on long-term maintenance and use. Platforms you may consider using for your SSOT also have tutorials for easy adoption, like Google Workspace’s data migration guide.

Companywide adoption

A big challenge of implementing an SSOT is adoption. It can be especially difficult for teams with varied levels of technological fluency or comfort, or wildly different data formats and reporting structures. 

To ease the transition, encourage engagement and keep team members on the same page. Make sure you provide initial training, and make the SSOT a reference point in meetings and a required step in internal workflows. It may also be helpful to assign a primary stakeholder to field questions and monitor usage until filing and naming conventions are second nature. 

Regular maintenance

An SSOT isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it tool. It requires consistent engagement and auditing to ensure reliable data quality and data security.

Set aside a recurring time—once a month if your data sources are complex, or perhaps once a quarter, or biannually—to audit the contents of your SSOT and gather usage feedback from stakeholders to assess the usefulness of your evolving system in various business processes.

How to implement SSOT

1. Identify data sources
2. Decide how to store your data
3. Import data
4. Organize data
5. Establish data management rules
6. Train your staff
7. Rework your workflow

An SSOT became an operational necessity for Raven Gibson, founder of fashion and accessories brand Legendary Rootz. “When I first started, I didn’t have a process,” she explains on an episode of Shopify Masters. “I was inspired, I created, I shared, and it was available. But now I put a little more intention behind it.” That intention is backed by Raven’s commitment to data management—and a design-forward SSOT to organize it all. Here’s what you need to know to build your own:

1. Identify data sources

First, take stock of which data is most important to your day-to-day operations, where it lives in existing systems, and relevant stakeholders (i.e., those who engage with it most often and understand it best). 

This might include customer information and interactions, product development, website traffic, inventory management, marketing communications, and more. The goal is to ensure essential information is captured and maintained in your SSOT.

2. Decide how to store your data

Next, decide where your SSOT will live. Depending on your personal preference or team bandwidth, this could be a simple (and easily customizable) cloud-based storage platform, like Google Drive or Dropbox. If customer data is your biggest concern, a customer relationship management (CRM) solution like Zendesk or HubSpot might be the best fit. 

Raven uses the workspace software Notion to simplify her creative process and design timeline. “Ideas spark, and instead of rushing into it, I take note of it in Notion,” she says. “I have a database where I keep track of all my ideas, who I envision the design on, and how I want to market it.”

3. Import data

Once you’ve chosen the right location for your hub, the next step is importing all your data into it. Bulk importing—using tools like Excel or Numbers—can be an especially effective way to aid data integration. “You can export and import your CSVs, filter by tags, collection, and visibility,” says Raven.

If your company deals with a wider variety of data, an ETL (extract, transform, load) tool may be more useful. Many ETLs easily integrate with Shopify, creating a seamless representation of store data in your SSOT. Airbyte, Fivetran, Skyvia, and Panoply are practical choices, depending on your budget and needs.

4. Organize data

After importing your data, you’ll need to organize it logically and make it easy for your team to navigate. Use dedicated team- or subject-related folders with consistent naming conventions you can apply across all data. (Enforcing these conventions will become important later.)

5. Establish data management rules

Clear data governance and data management policies establish best practices for maintaining your SSOT and guaranteeing up-to-date data. While data management encompasses how data is organized, stored, and retrieved, data governance deals with issues of data security, ownership, and overall quality and accuracy. Many businesses dedicate one team member to establish and oversee these practices.

Define how often you’ll audit your data, checking for incorrect formatting, missing fields, or duplicates, to ensure that new data is being imported smoothly. 

6. Train your staff

Provide adequate training on where data comes from, where it lives, and how to incorporate it into everyday workflows. Post labeling conventions and quick-reference instructions on the SSOT’s main page (or “wiki”) for easy access.

For example, teams might use the SSOT for making edits and suggestions for a new product, instead of disparate notes in emails, Slack messages, or Figma files.

7. Rework your workflow

With your SSOT in place, your workflow may need to shift slightly to incorporate it. Whether you’re a solopreneur or running a company with multiple departments, decide when and how new items or projects are entered into your system, and when you’ll update or move them along the pipeline.

This could also mean templating recurring projects, like seasonal releases or marketing campaigns, which not only makes things easier in the moment, but creates a historical record of past projects and decisions that let you see the forest for the trees as you evolve. 

Anchoring her product design and business processes in an SSOT helps Raven set and meet expectations, both for herself and external vendors. “Depending on whether the product is going to be apparel or accessories, or home décor, I have templates set up. When I’m working with vendors or making sure that the product is how I envisioned it, those templates help make sure that there’s a standard across the board.”