I think this is a key point - too often, data "scientists" are brought in, given lots of tools, paid lots of money, and then told to just count things. And build dashboards that count things.

The data scientists that I have seen that are successful and bring the most value and seem to have the most satisfaction are those that spend time actually doing analysis and provide deep insights into the problems they are looking in to. The answers are the easy part - asking the right question is the difficult part.