Organizations use data analytics in a variety of ways: A health insurance company may want a way to identify emerging risk factors for disease in its patient populations; a nonprofit that connects bone marrow donors with people requiring transplants may look for ways to slash the time it takes to identify a likely match; a national retailer may seek to better understand the shopping preferences and habits of its target customers.

On the surface, at least, there’s little in common among these organizations and what they hope to achieve, but they each must excel at the same thing to succeed: They have to be adept at organizing and analyzing data, and they need a data strategy that ultimately works for them.

Organizations keep their data in a lot of different places: onsite, in the cloud (another person’s data center) or in an all-in-one data warehouse. Often, this data is siloed. But if an organization could harness the power of its data and become a data-driven organization, it would be able to grow and compete more effectively. The company could move mountains — or so the idea goes. So why do data projects fail, and how can changing the organization’s culture turn things around?