Can You Trust Your Numbers?
Most companies have reporting. Few operate on operational truth.
They have BI dashboards.
But teams don’t have what they need, so they revert to spreadsheets.
Each department operates on its own version of reality.
Spreadsheets are a signal that the work to trust your numbers has not been done.
What Does It Actually Mean to Trust Your Numbers?
It means operating on truth.
The same metric means the same thing across finance, operations, and sales
Results can be understood by the trend analysis of business drivers
Reports reflect what is actually happening
Problems and opportunities are identified early and acted upon
The facts are not debated. Only the decisions are.
If any of this does not exist or breaks down, you are no longer operating on truth.
How Do I know If Truth Is Missing?
It shows up in simple ways.
Customer service hears complaints.
Sales hears complaints.
Reporting shows OTIF at 95%
If reports tell you one thing, but you’re hearing another, then Operational Truth™ has not been defined.
The Achilles' heel of analytics is that they are designed to address symptoms rather than the root causes of business problems. Each department creates its own version of reality from a siloed perspective, which also reflect what someone wants and does not want seen.
When finance attempts to consolidate, numbers don’t tie out. A great deal of manual work goes into figuring out what happened and why.
The challenge is human nature. The reluctance to let problems be visible. People do not want performance issues revealed; they prefer to keep them quiet and work to resolve them without anyone knowing. This is the way the world has been for decades. But analytics require truth.
Truth cannot be defined without the right culture, and most cultures are not conducive to truth.
So the facts are softened, adjusted, or omitted.
The Trusted Facts Difference
Trusted Facts is focused on defining truth. Agreeing to live by it, and that starts and stops with the CEO. The CEO and CFO must champion truth, transparency, teamwork, and accountability to the organization. Before the company as a whole, it starts with the Trusted Facts project team.
Where Do Most Companies Go Wrong with AI?
They try to jump straight to AI. But if the numbers are not trusted, AI does not know and cannot fix that. It produces confident answers based on flawed inputs. BI and AI become IT-led initiatives without business ownership. Projects move forward without a defined business outcome and fail to deliver the impact that the board expects.
Trusted Facts is a Business-first Approach to BI and AI.
It is a change in how the business runs:
Executive commitment to truth
Establishes undisputed business performance metrics
Business case-driven prioritization of projects with clear owners and accountability
Explore The Next Steps
The CEO Mandate for Truth →
Understanding AI Readiness →
The Trusted Facts Method →