Recently, I attended a Forrester conference where I was asked to present a question to a breakout group to discuss the application of Big Data to state government.  My specific question was:  When developing our overall data strategy, it often feels like we're pushing a rope up hill. Some clients are still vested in using their spreadsheets, and some clients feel overly protective of their data.  When building a business case, how do we address the cultural differences between departments?  Is it possible to promote maturity using analytics, or is it the other way around, that the organization must mature to some level before analytics are worth the effort?To expand on this a little bit, it seems that different agencies in state government are at different levels of maturity.  When we propose business analytics, we in IT are trying to come up with the service catalogue item such that any agency can subscribe from our centralized catalog of services.  Often, this is really limited to the agency’s maturity to consume the service.  In some agencies, we find very mature business processes that welcome analytics to provide prescriptive activities to optimize performance.