> Speaking to Ars, Amazon Web Services Senior Product Manager Danny Smith explained a non-obvious conundrum: Waiting for a data scientist to analyze one's data "is like waiting for an IT project," he said, noting that biz analyst customers have told him things like, "'We have to wait 18 months to just get to the front of the queue.' And then the data scientists, who are all scarce resources, they're like, 'Well, OK, what's the project's ROI?'"

> Smith continued: "And the business analyst is like, 'If I knew that, I wouldn't need your help!... I've got this data, I've got a business problem. I've got questions for this data. I don't know what it's worth until we actually do the analysis.' So the business analyst is thinking about just accelerating to the point where they can actually argue for or justify their use of a scarce data scientist."

Well as a data scientist I can tell you the ROI of this project is 0 because its a worthless model. Or really negative because it seems like it'd be pretty dangerous to use in practice.

The critical error here is having the business analyst scope this out at all They don't know what they're doing. They don't know how to evaluate the results or predict the likely outcomes.