One KPI, many interpretations: how data control simplifies decision-making

In a world of dashboards and real-time reports, many businesses still face the same old problem: no one can agree on what the numbers mean. Ask five teams to explain a KPI and you’ll get at least five different answers - and probably many more.

It’s not just frustrating. It’s costly. Conflicting interpretations lead to delays, double-checking, misaligned decisions and undermined confidence. Leaders lose trust in the data. Teams build parallel spreadsheets. And decisions that should be swift become cautious or contentious.

The cost of confusion

At the heart of the issue is not the data itself, but the lack of control around it. When definitions vary, sources aren’t aligned and exceptions aren’t accounted for, the result is confusion. You can’t have meaningful insight if your source data is full of contradiction.

This meaning is key.

As Jeffrey Slort, Leader of Technology and Development at All Your BI says: “You can’t just align the data - you have to align the meaning behind the data.”

This search for meaning is the reality for many mid-sized businesses. As they scale, data complexity grows faster than data confidence. Finance has one version of revenue. Sales have another. Operations report on margin differently from the board. Everyone is working hard, but the foundations don’t hold up under scrutiny.

Data Control Services from All Your BI is designed to fix that. It is not about better visualizations or clever algorithms. It is about laying a clean, agreed foundation for everything that follows. The service starts by understanding how your business actually operates. It identifies where misalignments happen and why, then works through each issue until there is one version of the truth that everyone can rely on.

That includes logic definitions, naming conventions, tolerance levels and reconciliation rules. But more than that, it includes conversations.

As Jeffrey puts it: “The critical discussions between finance and sales, product and ops, front office and back office are what makes shared understanding possible.”

Without that, there cannot be shared reporting.

The power of shared meaning

The impact is immediate. Decisions speed up. Arguments drop away. Leadership can focus on action rather than arbitration. And the value of all your BI tools, from dashboards to forecasts, increases simply because people trust what they’re seeing.

It also builds confidence further down the organization. When team leads know the numbers they report up are consistent with what leadership sees, accountability strengthens. Performance conversations become more objective. And time previously spent checking, fixing and debating the data is freed up to act on it instead.

Confidence that drives business forward

In data terms, this is not the glamorous end. But it is the one that makes everything else possible. A single KPI means nothing if no one agrees how it’s built. With the right data control, that same KPI becomes the signal that drives the business forward.