There is no one recipe for making the case for Customer MDM. Attempts to try to calculate and project ROI will be a swag at best and probably miss the central point that MDM is really an evolving business practice that is necessary to better manage your data, and not a specific project with a specific expectation and time-based outcome that can be calculated up front. Instead, consider all the business dependencies and decisions made that are associated with this data. If anything, the longer-term value of MDM can only be truly measured in real time as cohesive data management and sound governance decisions are made based on ongoing business needs and strategic plans. MDM practices driven by a governance process should certainly consider ROI where possible in making investment and data quality improvement decisions, but MDM, as a developing internal core competency, should be considered as an investment toward improving fundamental data management practices across the company.
Consider what we have identified as the fundamentals of Customer MDM practices. These are process and quality management investment areas that should be justifiable based on any number of existing business problems and data issues. Company A might suffer from such poor data quality that it can barely function. Company B may face severe strict government oversight. In any event, companies first need to recognize the strongest probable benefits of an MDM initiative and build the business case around that. Next, they should estimate how much they are losing by not realizing all the benefits of a having a timely, accurate, and consistent set of data delivered to the company. This is sometimes referred to as activity-based costing (ABC). Often, the best way to measure the potential benefit of MDM involves determining the amount of money that a company spends with reactive activities in place to compensate for a suboptimal set of processes and tools.