By establishing golden records with common identifiers, MDM eliminates redundancy and enables accurate data exchange across departments (e.g., between Planning, Utilities and Public Health). With a single version of the truth for different data domains, departments can make more informed decisions knowing they have access to high-quality, trusted data and improve operational efficiencies stemming from reduced manual data corrections and more tightly integrated systems.

Like many organizations in the private sector, local governments face a blend of organizational, technical and cultural barriers when trying to implement master data management. For example:

• Data inconsistencies between departments: Most departments collect and maintain data in their own systems with little coordination. For example, a city’s utility billing system may store customer addresses one way, while the planning department’s land parcel management system uses a different format or schema. This leads to conflicting records and manual workarounds, especially when staff try to reconcile data for reports, compliance or service delivery.
• Poor quality data from legacy source systems: Many local governments rely on systems that were never designed to support integration. These older systems may not validate addresses, enforce formatting rules or link records using stable identifiers. It’s common to find the same person duplicated under slightly different names or values — for example, “123 E Main St” in one place and “123 East Main Street” in another. This can prevent stakeholders from being able to answer even simple questions without having to clean and match records across systems.
• Unclear roles and responsibilities: It’s often not clear who is responsible for maintaining key data entities like addresses, residents or assets. Some departments assume IT owns the data, while IT sees itself as a system administrator, not a data steward. In many cases, there are no established processes to review, validate or govern critical data elements across departments. This makes it difficult to make decisions about data corrections, deduplication or standardization — especially when there are competing views of what is “right.” Without clearly assigned ownership and rules for managing change, efforts to improve data quality stall.

Implementing MDM in state and local government offers at least several different benefits:

Improved operational efficiency

MDM allows government agencies to maintain clean, connected records across systems. When departments share a consistent view of addresses, customers and assets, staff no longer have to re-enter the same information in multiple systems or verify records manually. This reduces time spent resolving data conflicts, especially for work orders, inspections, permitting and billing.

For example, if a stormwater maintenance crew logs a repair to a catch basin, MDM ensures the asset ID, address and GIS location all match the same record used by the asset management system, the GIS team and the customer service portal. That consistency reduces duplication and improves the accuracy of reporting.

More effective cross-departmental work

Agencies like water utilities, planning and emergency services often need to collaborate. However, without reliable shared data, they often wind up making decisions based on partial or inconsistent information. MDM gives departments access to shared data so that they can align their work.

For example, during a heavy rainfall event, stormwater managers can use MDM-enriched data to quickly identify which parcels of land are at risk, which customers are affected and which assets have maintenance histories tied to recent issues. This type of coordination isn’t possible when data is fragmented or stuck in data silos.

Reporting, compliance and funding

State and local governments are often required to submit data to regulators (e.g., EPA, HUD, state auditors) or justify funding requests for infrastructure projects. MDM makes it easier to generate consistent reports by linking data across systems and enforcing validation rules.

Instead of stitching together ad hoc reports using spreadsheets, government agencies can generate defensible outputs that satisfy both external requirements and internal planning needs. This not only improves compliance but also supports grant applications, legislative reporting and public transparency initiatives.