“Data Science is a three-legged stool that combines business acumen, data wrangling and analytics to create extreme value. Focusing on the hard science skills such as statistical methods is a common mistake when actually, developing the knowledge about a particular business and wrangling the relevant data are often the most important skills to bring to the table.”
In my experience, failure of data science and advanced analytics projects most often is the result of a lack of business understanding or lack of clean data. These skills are often under valued when searching for data scientists and can result in a diminished or absent ROI on big data implementations and projects.