At Disruptive Thinking we have the privilege of working with some of the most capable, creative,...
No business wakes up one morning and thinks, “You know what we need? Six different versions of the same customer.” It just sort of… happens.
Growth has a way of doing that. A new system arrives to solve a very real problem, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief because something finally works the way it should. A gap is closed, a process improves, momentum builds. Then the team grows, new needs emerge, another tool is layered in, and before long the business begins to resemble a Jenga tower built by different people at different times, each working from slightly different instructions.
It stands. Mostly. At least until someone sneezes.
When complexity quietly masquerades as progress
In the early stages, this kind of complexity feels not only manageable but entirely reasonable. A little manual reconciliation here, a spreadsheet there that’s more reliable than the dashboard, a report that needs a bit of explanation before it makes sense. Meetings begin with the familiar question, “Which number are we using today?” It’s not ideal, but it feels like a small price to pay for growth.
After all, the business is moving forward.
Over time, though, something subtle begins to shift. Without anyone explicitly deciding it, the organisation starts to lose a shared understanding of itself.
The same customer now exists in multiple places, each with slightly different details, histories, and definitions. One version lives in a CRM, another in an email platform, another in marketing automation, and yet another in a spreadsheet carefully maintained “just in case.” Marketing sees engagement, sales sees pipeline, finance sees revenue. Everyone is doing their job properly, and everyone is technically right.
Yet no one is seeing the whole picture.
When growth removes the margin for error
This way of working can persist for longer than most people expect. Humans are remarkably good at compensating for fragmented systems through workarounds, meetings, and quiet heroics that never quite make it into a job description.
Eventually, though, growth removes the margin for error because the questions become more important, the decisions more consequential, and the tolerance for uncertainty much lower. Leadership wants confidence rather than caveats. Automation promises speed but delivers confusion. Trust in the data begins to wobble, and once that trust erodes, progress slows-not because people aren’t capable, but because every decision feels as though it’s being made on unstable ground.
This is usually the point at which phrases like ‘data unification’ or ‘consolidation’ begin to enter the conversation, not as buzzwords, but as signals that the business has outgrown the way it understands itself.
Unification is not a reset button
At this stage, many organisations make a perfectly understandable assumption: that unification means ripping everything out and starting again. Finding the ‘one true platform’. Declaring tool bankruptcy, and beginning afresh, this time properly.
In practice, that approach rarely works.
Multiple systems are an inevitable part of a growing business. Different teams have different needs, and new tools will always appear as the organisation evolves. The real issue is not how many systems exist, but how-or whether-they work together to create a single, trusted version of the truth.
Unification is not about fewer tools. It is about a clearer truth
It is a deliberate decision to say that regardless of where data lives, the business will understand it in one coherent way.
This matters everywhere, but it matters most when it comes to customers, because when different teams are working from different versions of the same customer, alignment becomes manual, fragile, and exhausting.
The unglamorous work that actually changes things
The path to unification is rarely dramatic. There is no big reveal or overnight transformation. Instead, it is made up of quiet, deliberate work.
Data has to be pulled out of the places it has accumulated over time. It needs to be cleaned, with duplicates resolved, inconsistencies addressed, and uncomfortable realities acknowledged rather than ignored. Records then need to be connected so that one customer is recognised as one customer everywhere, rather than appearing as multiple slightly different entries with competing truths.
This is where real change happens. Not in dashboards, but in decisions about meaning, ownership, and flow. About which source leads, how updates propagate, and what the business is willing to agree on as true. Like good plumbing, this work is largely invisible when it is done well, but absolutely essential to everything that depends on it.
Questions worth asking before adding the next tool
Before layering in the next system, it is worth pausing to ask a few honest questions:
- Would different teams give the same answer if asked how many customers the business has?
- Do important decisions rely on shared confidence in the data, or on last-minute spreadsheet heroics?
- When customer information changes, does that truth flow through the organisation, or does it stop at the system boundary?
These are not technical questions. They are organisational ones, and they reveal whether a business is genuinely aligned or simply coping.
Future-proofing through clarity
Future-proofing is not always about fewer tools, more dashboards, or increasingly sophisticated technology. It is about building one business that can see itself clearly.
A business that can grow without constantly tripping over its own data, that can add new systems without fragmenting reality, and that allows teams to move together because they are grounded in the same understanding of the truth.
The real risk is not having lots of systems, it’s running one business with too many versions of the truth, and quietly hoping they will eventually agree with each other. They probably won’t, unless you take action to ensure that they do!
If you need a hand working out the best way of doing this in your business, we'd love to have a quick chat. Get in touch - yiuwin@hellodisruptive.com