Software and data
Single source of truth
The principle that each piece of information should be stored and edited in exactly one place, with everything else reading from it.
What single source of truth means in practice
When a customer address exists in three systems, all three will eventually disagree, and no procedure prevents that indefinitely. The question stops being which is right and becomes who last updated which, which is not a question anyone can answer under pressure.
Applying it does not mean one enormous system. It means deciding, per type of data, which system owns it, and making the others read rather than hold their own copy. That decision is usually the most valuable hour spent on any integration project, and it is the difference between systems that are genuinely connected and several systems that simply argue with one another until somebody adjudicates by hand.
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