What is the single biggest challenge of your data & analytics department? How much of this do you think is attributed to beliefs and toxic headlines that are outside your actual organization?

I have to say that the primary challenge our data/analytics department faces is:
(1) navigating and handling the complex data landscape of today's world and
(2) interacting and getting buy-in for business stakeholders

As the volume and variety of data sources continue to expand, ensuring data accuracy, consolidating all the disparate datasets while simultaneously answering to and convincing business stakeholders to make data-driven decisions are of paramount importance.

While external factors, such as beliefs repeated in both social and traditional media can influence and amplify those false perceptions, it is usually the internal challenges that create issues.

So instead of our team seeing problems for every solution, we maintain open communication with all stakeholders, use technology whenever needed and apply safeguards and best-practices to ensure that we remain a trustful "internal consultant" for our business.

I will way not that many of our challenges are attributed from external factor, I will say that expectations can be motivated and drived by external factors such as new technologies and solutions accessible by the general public, or demonstrated during conference or demos. We always have to reminds our key stakeholder that nothing happen per magic and the data foundatation, data governence and data integration remains essentials for our journey in order to deliver valuable projects and overcome those challenges.