Establishing a Single Source of Asset Truth to Enhance Long-Term Strategic Planning
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hrough collaboration with other senior staff, Financial Officers play a pivotal role in defining organizations’ operations and levels of service. Key responsibilities include leading the sustainable allocation of limited resources through the development of longterm financial plans, as well as evaluating organizations’ performance through the preparation of financial statements. This annual process is met with a set of unique challenges, one of which being data collection. Without a single source of asset truth, Financial Officers face barriers that deter confidence required in long-term strategic planning and performance evaluation. A sole asset ledger containing data collected from multiple departments ensures consistency, accuracy, and that the information is up to date. Yet many local governments have multiple data registries for separate departmental functions, resulting in silos of data. The use of individual data sets is represented in Figure 1, demonstrating four different systems collecting Figure 1. Example of Data Silos
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data: Tangible Capital Asset registry, Asset Management registry, Computerized Maintenance Manager System (CMMS), and Geographic Information System (GIS). Figure 1 also shows the variety of reporting and planning documents produced by each system. This type of data collection system leads to inefficiencies and may result in data inaccuracies. A single system that hosts all of an organization’s asset data will diminish the risks associated with siloed data and ultimately achieve greater productivity and efficiency. Figure 2 establishes a process that produces a single source of asset truth. By having one single system, all activities related to each asset are updated in one central registry, removing the redundancy of departments updating their ledgers independently. Additionally, having one central system enables departments to access data that they may not otherwise have access to, increasing reporting flexibility across the organization.
