Do You Trust the Facts on Which You Operate Your Business?
Most organizations have reporting. Few operate on trusted facts.
Trusted Facts™ helps organizations establish operational truth so leaders can trust their numbers and manage business outcomes in real time.
Do you get insights, or just outcomes?
Most reporting delivers the results.
Month to date.
Quarter to date.
Year over year.
The Trusted Facts Method enables organization s to see risks and opportunities in real time, while there is still time to manage business results.
Do your reports drive action, or meetings to figure out what’s going on?
If reports don’t match…
If teams see performance differently…
If it takes days or weeks to understand what happened…
If so, your responsiveness suffers.
What you’re likely experiencing…
It shows up like this:
Reports don’t match across departments
Teams disagree on performance
It takes too long to understand what happened
You see results, but not what is driving them
You have real-time visibility of results, but not of the drivers behind them.
By the time the drivers are understood, the opportunity to act is already gone.
The real problem: timeliness and depth of insight
Can you see what is happening and why as it unfolds?
Are the right people alerted when a key driver unexpectedly shifts, like OTIF?
Most organizations cannot. They operate on:
Delayed visibility
Aggregated metrics (revenue, backlog, OTIF)
Manual investigation (meetings about meetings about declining performance)
Most organizations manage performance by looking backward.
If you are not proactively managing the drivers, you’re allowing results to happen to you.
The root cause is a business challenge, not technical
Requirements are defined through interviews across business departments. The challenge is that each team brings a functional, siloed perspective. As a result, teams often define business terms differently, even for something as seemingly straightforward as customer or revenue.
Additionally, these stakeholders have a limited understanding of what modern analytics can enable. Their needs are bound to and reactive to the current state, which is often driven by daily firefighting. The requirements call for a larger hose but do not eliminate the source of the fire. They are unaware of the opportunity to eliminate the source or how to do so.
All requests are urgent and considered high priority. IT and its partners do their best to deliver across those needs. But because requirements are fragmented, the work becomes like assembling a jigsaw puzzle without knowing the picture, because what success looks like is not clearly defined.
The reports deliver incomplete and inconsistent outputs because they are built on flawed requirements.
CEO and CFO leadership is essential
Getting ROI from analytics and AI requires significant capital investment and the time of your key people to build the assets properly. Each build within the program must be grounded in a clear business case with specific operational and financial impact objectives.
The CFO serves as the business owner, bringing a financial, operational, and risk perspective to evaluate priorities and act as the final decision-maker, overseeing the project team and the governance council. But understanding what problems exist and what it will take to solve them requires uncomfortable truths to be surfaced.
The CEO must establish that truthful, objective, and respectful discussion of problems and opportunities is the professional standard and responsibility. This expectation must be consistently communicated, along with why truth matters and what it means for everyone in the organization. People must feel safe raising issues they believe are restricting performance, even when there are concerns about how it may reflect on peers or leaders. What matters is not the past, but how leaders and individuals commit to pursuing and acting on operational truth going forward.
Only with CEO and CFO leadership can the right culture support the objective critical thinking needed to establish operational truth on which to run the business.
How Trusted Facts™ Came Together
Trusted Facts™ are clearly defined, trusted measures of business performance that leaders use to manage outcomes in real time. The approach was built over years of working alongside executive and management teams to establish trusted, actionable business insights in reporting that drive real business impact.
After the first handful of data strategy projects, I observed that analytics was consistently treated as an IT project. While IT is critical, what matters most is prioritizing what needs to be measured and why. That is a business question. It must align to strategic goals.
I started asking for meetings with the CEO and CFO. When I did not get that access, outcomes suffered. Without their direct input, there was not a clear and aligned understanding of strategic goals. As a result, project teams lacked clarity on what mattered most for growth and risk management. There were champions, but also powerful resistors, both in the business and IT.
I developed Trusted Facts™ to put these principles on the table from the start:
Active CEO and CFO engagement is essential
Business teams align on and own definitions and formulas
A business case is established and presented to a council for each phase of work
IT and the business operate as strategic partners, jointly responsible for success
Each organization’s journey is unique. Most have already invested in modernizing analytics, with meaningful work that can be leveraged moving forward. What I consistently find, however, is insufficient attention to the fundamentals. It is human nature to want to move quickly and advance to more sophisticated capabilities. But in every discipline, sports, medicine, law, business, and analytics, progress depends on getting the fundamentals right.
The same is true for AI. With proper guardrails, AI can begin to deliver value within a defined set of trusted facts. But it cannot create truth on its own.
AI is only as valuable as the facts it operates on. Trusted Facts formalizes the development of those fundamentals.
Start the Conversation
If this resonates, the next step is a focused discussion.
We will look at your business and identify:
What business facts are trusted
What is limiting trust in your business facts
Where you can create immediate business value
Schedule a discussion with John Bruhnke, the author of Trusted Facts →