Every organisation has multiple systems, multiple data sets, multiple versions of the same number depending on who you ask and when.
COOs have it worse than almost anyone else in the leadership team, because they sit at the intersection of the most systems: project management, finance, HR, capacity planning, strategic planning. Each function has its own data, its own tools, its own definitions. When the COO tries to synthesise across them, the inconsistencies are as numerous as the data points.
Why Single Sources of Truth Are So Hard
The technical problem is real but solvable — data integration is well-understood, even if it’s expensive. The harder problem is definitional. What do we mean by “project cost”? Does it include people time? Contractor fees? Infrastructure? The answer varies by function and by question.
“What’s the capacity of the engineering team?” means something different to the project manager (how many dev-days are available?), the finance team (what’s the fully-loaded cost rate?), and the COO (can we take on this new initiative or not?).
Until the definitions are agreed, no single source of truth can satisfy everyone — because the truth looks different depending on what question you’re asking.
The Practical Approach
The pragmatic answer is not one system to rule them all. It’s a clear hierarchy of systems, with agreed definitions for each context.
For operations decisions, the project management and capacity system is authoritative. For financial decisions, the finance system is authoritative. For people decisions, the HR system is authoritative. The COO’s role is to synthesise across these authoritative sources, not to find one system that replaces them all.
What the COO does need is a dashboard layer that aggregates the key signals from each system — not replacing the underlying systems, but surfacing the operational intelligence that sits across them.
