I was a consultant at one of the giant outsourcers and nod my head vigorously at this comment. The least sexy projects were MDM (master data management) but they were absolutely essential to the success of any other fancy analytics/BI/ML project.
Interestingly I too worked on MDM systems about ten years ago, when I was at IBM Research. Ironically, one of my first ideas for applying machine learning was in de-duplication of data in an MDM server. However the technology was a bit too primitive back in 2010 and the project was a hard sell so it was abandoned.