Achieving a Single Source of Truth at https://www.oldstreetsolutions.com/single-source-of-truth Single source of truth (SSOT) is a concept used to ensure that everyone in an organization makes decisions based on the same data. In document management terms, it’s about centralizing all relevant and up-to-date documents about your company and projects so that they’re accessible from one place.

1. Achieving a Single
Source of Truth in
your Organization

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Achieving a Single Source of Truth in your Organization
Introduction
Single source of truth (SSOT) is a concept used to ensure that everyone in an organization
makes decisions based on the same data. In document management terms, it’s about
centralizing all relevant and up-to-date documents about your company and projects so that
they’re accessible from one place.
Why is it important? Because if your teams are storing important documents in personal
inboxes or saving them to desktops and folders that no one else can access, they’re effectively
hiding information from the rest of the team. This makes it very difficult if not impossible for
everybody to be on the same page when they need to be. Cue mistakes and missed deadlines,
not to mention version control issues on projects.
SSOT is how you avoid this. Instead of your employees clambering over a ton of wrong
answers, outdated answers, and duplicated answers in your system, they’re able to find the
right answer straight away – because it’s the only one that’s there.

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SSOT: simple to understand, not so simple to
implement
Although SSOT is a simple concept, it can be far from simple to implement. That’s because most
organizations have a tangle of disparate pieces of software all over their business, which they’ve
purchased over years to facilitate different tasks. And while many of these tools are great and do
exactly what you need them to do, they’re likely part of a proprietary ecosystem. That means they’re
capable of integrating with the other business tools in that ecosystem, but not outside it.
As a result, most businesses have bits of Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, and many more. These tools
don’t all play well together because they’re not designed to, and because the tech companies really
only want you using their tools, not their rivals’.
The problem is, when development, sales, HR, admin, and other departments are all using different
software, and these tools aren’t properly integrated and exchanging data, consolidating the company’s
information becomes difficult and time-consuming. This in turn can result in poor data quality and
accessibility capable of delaying decisions or leading to bad ones.

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“Too many tools” in a remote working age
Sure, most organizations have been suffering from this “too many tools” syndrome and by
and large coping with it for decades. However, the post-2020 working environment is a
distributed one.
That’s made getting everyone in your organization on the same page not just an ideal but a
necessity. Gone are the water cooler moments when you’d be able to quickly update your
colleague on a project. Now that teams are remote and in many cases spread across time
zones, getting them all working off the same information takes a lot of discipline. Particularly
if they’re in different software platforms.
Which is why they shouldn’t be. Document collaboration is much easier if everybody’s editing
the same document, rather than a muddle of Word docs, Google docs, PDFs, spreadsheets,
and emails. Attaining a single source of truth in your organization means getting as many
users as possible to adopt a single platform, like Confluence.

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The problem with Word and Google Docs
Migrating everybody over to a single platform is easier said than done.
First you have the issue of people being quite happy using the tools they’ve always used and
are familiar with.
Everybody balks at change, particularly if they see it as an “it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”-type
situation. It’s your job to explain why it is broken and why everyone using a platform like
Confluence can fix it.
For instance, when I joined Old Street Solutions, I myself kept using Word documents on my
computer for a while, for writing articles like this one.
This wasn’t very conducive to fast, efficient collaboration.

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The problem with Word and Google Docs
Those Word docs sat on my computer, never seen by anyone else unless I emailed them to
someone.
Sure, my colleagues could then write comments on the document or make tracked changes.
But I can’t see their comments and changes till they send them back to me.
A Word docs isn’t a live document unless you save it to something like SharePoint or
OneDrive and turn it into one.
Eventually I graduated to Google Docs, which are live documents, stored online in the cloud.
However, having a bunch of Google Docs in a shared Google Drive folder isn’t very visual,
dynamic, or navigable. Nor is it easy to scale when you have lots of documents. And because
it’s not open by default, files and information can get lost in unshared folders.

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Why I made the leap to Confluence
Confluence is more than just a document management platform. It’s an online workspace
and knowledge base. Confluence content is open by default; you don’t have to share pages
with people like you do with Google Docs. They’re there for your colleagues to find unless
you add restrictions. Moreover, they’re easier to find thanks to Confluence’s intuitive
space/page structure keeping all your documents visible, organized, and navigable.
Meanwhile, activity feeds and instant notifications keep you notified on what your colleagues
are working on. It’s much more transparent.
It’s because Confluence is a wiki, i.e. a collaborative website, whereas Google Docs is just a
word processor that happens to be online. Really, Confluence has more in common with
WordPress and other website builders than it does with conventional word processors.

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Why I made the leap to Confluence
What I soon discovered was that being more like a website builder than a word processor
makes Confluence easier to use. In word processors, you have to worry about formatting –
font type, font size, paragraphing, line spacing etc. In Confluence, these things are decided
for you. Sure, you have less control over what your document looks like, but do you need it?
In a document management platform you use internally? I’d argue not really.
And creating an article in Confluence is a little quicker than in Word or Google Docs because
you don’t have to think about that stuff.
Confluence also comes with a ton of other extras, like page templates and macros. Macros
are bits of other content that you can add to your Confluence pages, like a table of contents,
an info panel, a quote, or a tickable to-do list.

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Why I made the leap to Confluence
None of these things are possible in Word or Google Docs without much more granular
setup.
Best of all is Confluence’s version control.
All changes are automatically tracked and the page history feature enables you to compare
updated pages with any and all previous versions of it.
With my colleagues already in Confluence, I knew I should at least try it, particularly given the
fact that we’re a distributed and fully remote team, spread across multiple time zones.
When I saw that Confluence was a workspace as well as a place for making and storing
documents, I knew I’d be able to collaborate better there. And I can.

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The key to greater adoption of Confluence? The
Atlassian Marketplace
If you have people in your organization who aren’t coming to the same realization as I did on
their own, it’s time to start making Confluence a more enticing prospect. How do you do that?
By making sure Confluence can do the things they need it to do, easily. And how do you do
that? Marketplace add-ons.
The Atlassian Marketplace is home to thousands of apps that allow you to tailor your
Confluence instance to your needs. There are apps that make Confluence easier to use and
apps that extend native Confluence’s functionality for teams that need it to do more.
The sheer volume of apps can make the Atlassian Marketplace hard to navigate when you
don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. In order to not get lost in the weeds, our advice is
to find out what tools your employees are currently using, and what features they need, and
then have a look through the app categories for a match.

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The key to greater adoption of Confluence? The
Atlassian Marketplace
For example, a number of your employees could be using Excel for various business
activities, including project management, budgeting, and reporting. But an Atlassian
Marketplace app like Elements Spreadsheet might persuade them to ditch Excel and start
working in Confluence. This app, from Atlassian Gold Partner Elements, embeds a
spreadsheet into a Confluence page and offers all the core functionalities of Excel, including
multiple tabs and 400+ formulas. Number crunching in Confluence, anyone?
Moreover, Marketplace apps for Confluence can improve the way things are being done in
other platforms, making the shift to Confluence even more enticing. For example, many
companies write contracts in Word, Google Docs, and various other word processors. Then,
when it comes to the most important bit – getting them signed – they have to export the
contract to an e-signature platform like DocuSign.

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The key to greater adoption of Confluence? The
Atlassian Marketplace
This generates extra admin, puts sensitive contract information in more than one place, and
makes it difficult to track which agreement is which.
However, if you were to use Confluence to write, collaborate on, and store contracts, you can
use the Atlassian Marketplace app Contract Signatures for Confluence to execute the signing
process.
Because this is an e-signature app that integrates with Confluence, you’re able to send
contracts for signing without ever leaving Confluence AND without adding signees to your
Confluence instance. This would streamline your contract management process dramatically
while saving on Confluence licenses.

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Conclusion
If you want to get as many users as possible to adopt a single platform like Confluence, the
first thing to do is talk to the people you want to be using it. Find out what tools they’re using,
whether they’re happy with them, and why.
These conversations will reveal how much persuading and demonstrating you need to do.
Then, once you’ve got their buy-in, supporting them during and after deployment is
important, too. Lots of tools get dropped into employees’ laps with the expectation that they’ll
just get on with it.
If you don’t continue to engage with your employees post-deployment, they might decide the
new tool’s a bit too much hassle and revert back to the old one.

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Conclusion
Ultimately, though, it’s the tool itself that will win people over. Vital to the success of any
deployment is a user interface that’s simple, familiar, and easy to use, because if it’s not,
your employees simply won’t use it.
Fortunately, Confluence is a hugely intuitive and user-friendly tool that’s actually easier to use
than most word processors thanks to all the powerful on-page automation.
And if there’s something Confluence can’t do that your employees’ current tools can, search
the Atlassian Marketplace and install an add-on.
That way you will make Confluence a more attractive prospect and the transition to the
platform less jarring.