*3.5. Can Data Be Captured and Used at All?*

As mentioned earlier, many educational organizations struggle to procure the necessary human and financial resources to capture and analyze big data. A plethora of research has asserted that one of the largest challenges facing educational organizations is recruiting and retaining high-quality staff to manage big data and perform data analytics [15,17]. In this case, educational organizations often compete with the private sector for personnel fluent in quantitative methods and machine learning. As Macfadyen et al. argued, "it may not be surprising, then, that globally, education lags behind all other sectors in harnessing the power of analytics," as "a preliminary analysis indicates that educational institutions simply lack the practical, technical and financial capacity to effectively gather, manage and mine big data," [18] (p. 22).

Moreover, as bureaucracies, educational organizations resist change and innovation, often embracing an organizational culture that clings to prior methods of operation [4,6,15,17]. Macfadyen et al. reasoned that "there is recognition that even where technological competence and data exist, simple presentation of the facts (the potential power of analytics), no matter how accurate and authoritative, may not be enough to overcome institutional resistance" [18] (p. 22). This resistance comes in several forms, namely a cultural resistance that is established and perpetuated by organizational leadership, yet resistance also comes in the form of a lack of human or financial capacity to change [15,17], and a resistance to embrace big data due to an inability to strategically plan goals and initiatives to use big data [5,14,16,22].
