Everyone wants a single source of truth — but in practice, most large organizations end up with several platforms. So if the goal isn’t one system, what is it?

Karen Downs has a three-part answer: define what employees should experience, align the platform owners, and make it your success standard. In this issue, she walks through how.

Off to Karen! — Kim

Pop quiz ↘

A friend called me a few years back about a dashboard.

She had just stepped into a new internal communications leadership role. The dashboard was going to be an early win: pull the numbers together, show leadership what communications was actually doing, and set a baseline to improve against.

Then she went looking for the numbers.

News lived in one system. The rest of the intranet lived in another. Screens ran on their own platform. Email came from somewhere else. Four channels, four sets of data, four definitions of a view. There was no honest way to add them up, because nothing had ever been designed to add up.

She wasn’t underprepared. She had inherited a digital workplace with no plan to connect the experience.

I keep meeting people in the same position.

The part employees can see

The measurement problem stayed mostly invisible. The experience problem didn’t.

An employee clicks a story on the intranet homepage. The navigation disappears. The branding shifts. The URL changes. Search stops behaving the way it did 10 seconds earlier. Nothing warned them, so they shrug and file away one more small piece of evidence about how this place really works. It happens several times a week, to thousands of people.

Both decisions were defensible

I’ve built this kind of disjointed experience myself. Funding for a new intranet fell through, so we built a microsite for the CEO’s initiative instead. The rest of the intranet stayed stranded on the older experience.

It happens between departments, too, and rarely out of carelessness. The business buys a point solution for a capability the core platform can’t deliver. IT keeps what it can support and secure at scale. Both calls make sense. What never gets assigned is the space between them, so it’s as if the org chart is showing up in the interface.

What a single source of truth really is

Most of us have spent years asking for a single source of truth. But it isn’t one system, and no enterprise is going to run its digital workplace on one platform. Asking a technology owner to give one up is a budget fight that can run for years.

A single employee experience doesn’t require a single platform. It does require someone to define and own the experience across them. That’s how employees get what a single source of truth promises: knowing where they are and what to do next, without needing to understand your architecture.

Nobody has to lose anything for that to happen. No incumbent defends the space between systems, so you can stop negotiating the technology and define the behavior instead.

Start with the employee

Before you ask whether you have the right platforms, define what employees should experience regardless of platform. Take search: when it behaves differently depending on where someone started, employees learn not to trust it anywhere. Offer one search experience, or an honest explanation of its scope. The same goes for navigation, identity, and permissions.

This matters more as AI moves across the digital workplace. If the standards are unclear now, AI will amplify the fragmentation.

My friend is still working through this. What changed is that she stopped waiting for the technology question to resolve. Platforms get replaced and budgets move, but the experience standard should outlast the stack.

Two platforms is a technology inventory. “Two intranets” is what employees are left to reconcile on their own, without ever being told why.

* * *

If any of this is landing for you, I go deeper on it here — or if you’re sitting with a version of this problem right now, I’d love to hear how it’s showing up. Reply to this email or message me on LinkedIn.

Karen Downs

Digital Endurance: Why Some Workplace Programs Last and Most Don’t

Most intranet programs get the budget, sponsors, and attention at launch. Then what? Karen’s book covers the years that follow, and what separates programs that last from the ones that fade.

Learn more →

Digital Endurance

What keeps a digital
workplace alive

Why do some intranets stay useful for years while others lose their shine within months? The answer comes down to ten habits, such as clear decision rights, a standing measurement routine, and leaders who agree on the editorial strategy.

Full article →

Staffbase

Single Source of Truth Playbook

Complex systems don’t have to mean a complicated employee experience. This playbook names three patterns that get in the way and shows how Bellway Homes, Alaska Air Group, and Mister Car Wash solved them.

Get the guide →

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