Britain’s $144 Bn High-Speed 2 rail megaproject was pushed back again on 18 June. Two official reviews blamed spiralling costs on poor contract data, disconnected cost tracking and a lack of “hands-on, commercially-astute” oversight, prompting the transport secretary to call the project an “appalling mess.” At the heart of the critiques is a single, familiar root-cause: data living in separate pockets — cost logs here, schedule data there, risk registers in someone else’s spreadsheet — with no single source of truth.