Mastering Data Management

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Armed with Larry's pointers, you can better justify your business case for MDM

In this series of articles we have focused on building the business case for MDM. We have discussed the challenges of justifying an MDM business case, along with various scenarios that make the business case complexity vary significantly.

The following are the key takeaways from this blog series:

1. Business case justification should be approached with a solid understanding of MDM drivers, challenges, scenarios and techniques. This understanding should be applied in the context of the enterprise problem domains.

2. MDM can be driven by a business strategy or IT strategy. In both scenarios, you can successfully justify the business case. It is easier, however, when the need for MDM is driven by a business strategy. The best way to sell MDM to the business is not to mention MDM at all but rather focus on the business strategy or processes that it enables.

3. A number of techniques exist that help justify MDM initiatives even when a well defined business strategy is not available at the beginning of the MDM initiative.

4. A combination of traditional ROI/NPV estimates with the Economic Value approach produces the best results and helps to justify MDM business cases from  a variety of benefits that an enterprise can obtain through MDM.

5. An MDM business case is not only about the “hard” benefits. MDM justification requires both organizational and executive buy-in. This must be based on the consensus of multiple stakeholder groups about how each of these groups will benefit and be impacted by the planned MDM implementation.

6. Data governance policies that clearly identify information as a key enterprise asset and require accountabilities and metrics are important in building an organizational consensus.

This series of blog posts focused mostly on the business benefits of MDM and methods of their estimation. The benefits define the numerator in the ROI equation. For the ROI and NPV calculations, the cost structure is equally important.

Thus, to complete the business case, a detailed analysis of the key early decision points that significantly impact the MDM roadmap, costs, risks and mitigation strategies is also critical.

These decision points and a high-level MDM roadmap must be developed as part of the business case to position the enterprise for a balanced and profound cost-benefit analysis. The MDM roadmap should include a number of views critical for scope and costs estimations.

The importance of a balanced and properly defined MDM roadmap along with the MDM development techniques will be discussed in one of my future blog posts.

This is part of Larry Dubov's series, Building a Business Case for MDM. Visit the table of contents for any posts you may have missed.