Before you automate systems, decide which data wins

Ask an IT team a simple question, “How many laptops do we have?” and the answer often depends on who you ask and which console they open. For years, that ambiguity was manageable. People reconciled the differences in their heads, in spreadsheets, or in meetings. Ivanti research shows that 34% of organizations still track IT assets in spreadsheets, which shows how much reconciliation still happens by hand. Build the authoritative data source your AI can act on → Automation changes the stakes. When software acts on data without a person double-checking it first, the question of which data is correct stops being academic. People tolerate ambiguity and ask questions. Automation doesn’t. It executes at scale and at speed. What a system of record actually means A system of record is the authoritative source for a specific type of information. It is the place everyone agrees to trust when systems disagree. That doesn’t necessarily mean a single database holding everything. In most environments, it is more realistic to establish clear authority by data domain. One source might be authoritative for device identity and hardware details, another for user and identity data, another for servic…

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