A few months back, I was presenting with a friend at a Chief Data Officer summit in Dallas, and my co-presenter put up a slide that said, “60 % of all big data analytics projects fail.” Someone in the audience asked, “Why do they fail?” My friend said, “I think Paige could answer that better than I could.”

Put on the spot, three reasons that have been confirmed from multiple sources jumped immediately into my head. I used those three to answer the question. But later, when I had time to think, I realized there was one other reason that shows up repeatedly, but often gets downplayed or written off as not the REAL problem, when in my opinion, it very much is.