Many master data management (MDM) projects get approval and initial funding with vague planning and broad use cases. However, the projects that survive the renewal decision show measurable benefits for the company within their original justifications. Without a plan to show measurable success, your MDM implementation will most likely stall out. As with many projects, building a detailed justification may sound easier in theory than it is in practice. But I’m here to tell you — it can be done.
In this article, you’ll learn how to make a compelling, lasting case for MDM at your organization. To better illustrate the concepts we’ll explore, I’ve included real-world examples from the team at Mativ — a specialty materials manufacturing company and Profisee customer — who graciously shared their experience with me at the 2024 Data Hero Summit. Any quotes referenced in this article come from that talk, which you can watch here in its entirety.
Let’s jump in!
The State of Master Data Management (MDM) 2025
1. Thoroughly Investigate and Plan Success
MDM programs often develop from larger business strategy discussions or company initiatives. While the company strategy is a helpful rationale to begin the conversation, the actual justification document you present to leadership must include more detailed information.
In pre-justification investigations, hold discussions with stakeholders from across the org chart. Talking with the people who use master data in their everyday work, who report on that data and who make decisions based on that data will illuminate potential use cases – and benefits. Mativ IT Business Relationship Manager Casey Fortenberry said that the coordination between stakeholders and the project team helped define the project. “As our business case developed, we socialized this across the organization.”
The Mativ project team’s overarching goal grew from a company-wide initiative: OneMativ. This initiative called for unified data, operations and communications across 15 existing ERPs. An MDM program sat at the heart of this initiative, but more details were required to justify the work involved.
Through stakeholder discussions, Casey and his business operations counterpart, Jon Luke Davila (Sr. Manager – Data and Strategy), mapped out the needs of business stakeholders across the organization. They then determined which data initiatives to pursue first for others to build upon, whittling their list down to three use cases that would make measurable business impact that they could report on in terms of dollars, inventory numbers or hours saved. Those reportable details became the basis of Mativ’s justification.
2. Craft and Commit to a Detailed Justification
A persuasive justification includes details that describe measurable business benefits within two to four discrete use cases that support the wider company initiative or priority. Forecasting business benefits in dollars, hours saved or inventory numbers requires research, including:
- Discussions with stakeholders to understand the KPIs that impact their day-to-day
- Financial modeling based on bespoke business use cases
- Consultations with experts who have hands-on experience implementing successful MDM programs
The MDM program justification works best when stakeholders from the business, IT and the MDM vendor communicate consistently. Jon Luke “underestimated how much business teams wanted to engage in and participate in the project,” and found that by inviting these stakeholders into the room, the entire justification process moved faster because everyone was engaged and invested in success.
Of course, there were some numbers that the Mativ team had difficulty forecasting, like how much inventory they could reduce. That’s where their Profisee project lead in professional services supported their educated guesses with experience and expertise. Calling on success metrics from previous similar projects, Profisee Value Consultant Laurence Young helped pinpoint reasonable goals using Profisee’s Business Impact Assessment methodology and then refine them to be more realistic.
To back up their confidence in the justification, Mativ stakeholders signed commitments promising to achieve the outlined forecasts in the use cases. This move rallied the team around the program goals, giving them support when they needed to decline scope creep and reporting metrics to guide decisions.
3. Build Continued Cooperation Between Teams
The success of any MDM program justification and implementation project is closely correlated with the level of communication between all project members. At Mativ, project leads listened to stakeholders’ real, everyday problems and attempted to find real solutions.
The internal project leads worked closely with Profisee MDM experts to collaborate on the most impactful data and angles for each set of stakeholder meetings. These collaborations made stakeholder meetings go more smoothly and resulted in increased trust from the business teams. And for those whose most pressing needs did not make the initial justification, they still felt the project team understood their problems because they felt heard.
The cooperation between IT and business operations extended past the justification as the two departments worked together in short tool implementation-data processing cycles.
“Every step along this project has not just been ‘deploy tools, deploy tools, do backend data stuff’ — that’s it,” Jon Luke said. “We’ve taken it step by step: tool and data, then process improvement; then tool and data, then more process improvement. And by having that plan, it has given us ways to evaluate, ‘Did the steps we took actually do anything?’ If yes, great, and how do we lean into the part that we realized the most benefit from. If not, should we take the next step? Do we pivot? Do we do it a little differently? So I think going in with that plan and measures has given us a mechanism and a guide as we go through this to make sure that we don’t just spend a year or two years doing technology things while none of the business teams feel like there was a benefit to it.”
Success Breeds Success
The success of the investigation, justification and collaboration builds a foundation that drives the long-term success of the MDM program. As Casey from Mativ said, “It can’t be a business project without IT engagement, and it can’t be an IT project without the business.” Mativ’s MDM program experience changed how IT and the rest of the business interact.
Mativ’s MDM project is not just about tech — it’s about engaging the organization and socializing the process across the entire business. While this organizational change may have been challenging at times, it was the basis for the continued success of the MDM program, and it’s an excellent playbook to follow for anyone looking to implement MDM within their organization.
Selling MDM to Leadership
Share
