As someone who had to work on syncing multiple databases of customer and order data this was actually very important for me to know. Turned out that it could vary on a field by field basis and could also depend on the type of customer and where they came from.

To sync up our new and shiny SAP CRM with several Access databases and our customer-facing software I ended up writing a script that would collect all data field by field with varying hierarchies and writing it back out to everything. Worked surprisingly well.

I think that's better than one department (with the clout to do so) going "this is going to be our source of truth" while completely unprepared for what it means.

They literally spent over a year in talks with the whole rest of the damn company about what that would mean and what level of responsibility that would entail, delayed the go live multiple months multiple times... and they still can't do fucking basic data validation.

Leading and trailing spaces. Names randomly in all caps.

Oh, there's a shit ton built off the requirement that this field is one of these options? Surprise, we silently added another option without telling anyone, after we agreed in planning that option was invalid. Not our fault, your fault for building shit based off the idea this was a source of truth and we actually took requirements seriously.

Why is everyone coming to us to correct this data? Why can't you just correct it downstream like you used to? What do you mean we were warned? I wasn't paying attention during that meeting that you held specifically to warn me about this in advance because I was too busy ignoring all the other warnings people were telling me!

What do you mean that the thing you warned us would be consistently be delayed until next day because of how our source of truth works can't be done on demand on the same day? Huh, we signed off on it being okay, along with every other relevant department?

It's supposed to be a good practice ... in theory. In practice nobody knows what exists and who's in charge of what and there's exceptions and exceptions to exceptions.

Speaking for software engineering perspective. I see in other comment you're doing process engineering, I assume the term is used in a similar way

What's your job?