Source of truth

When the same fact lives in five places, they slowly stop agreeing, and nobody knows which one is right. A source of truth fixes that by naming one system as authoritative for each piece of data. Everything else reads from it rather than keeping its own copy.

It is a foundational move in any automation. Without one, workflows act on stale or conflicting values and quietly produce wrong results. With one, there is a single place to correct a fact and have the correction carry everywhere.