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In many ways technologists are fighting for the same ideals – just on different levels. The single source of truth is one of those ideals and I find it fascinating to know that other members of the IT community are tacking a similar problem in parallel. Consider the following:

ERP: CEOs look to enterprise resource planning software to provide a single version of the truth with regard to a company’s finances. According to CIO.com, “Finance has its own set of revenue numbers, sales has another version, and the different business units may each have their own version of how much they contributed to revenues. ERP creates a single version of the truth that cannot be questioned because everyone is using the same system.”

MDM: A March 2008 report from Gartner describes how master data management “can help enterprises achieve a single view of the product.” For example, a consumer goods manufacturer that produces wigits in different countries tends to maintain different versions of the same product specification data for governmental or regulatory reporting requirements. Over time the quality of these different versions changes or erodes leaving the business with multiple versions of the truth.

CMDB: Many IT departments have embarked on configuration management system (CMS) projects to synchronize and reconcile multiple federated data sources from performance, asset and system management tools. To provide a single source of truth about the health, availability and quality of the service provided to the business.

As a BSM vendor, my experience with CMDB customers tells me that the most suitable approach for this type of project it to leverage data directly from the trusted sources through integration, rather than attempting to copy, duplicate or otherwise centralize the data with methods such as ETL. In other words, build a centralized view, not a centralize repository, which of course is a key reason why calling it a configuration management system is more appropriate than calling it a configuration management database.

Still the fact that other areas of IT are seeking to find solutions to the similar challenges is interesting – and we’ll be on the look out for best practices. It’s also reminiscent of the idea that those who don’t read history are bound to repeat it.

- Jim