  Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) now generate digital data at an
unprecedented rate from online transactions, social media marketing and
associated customer interactions, online product or service reviews and
feedback, clinical diagnosis, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and production
processes. All these forms of data can be transformed into monetary value if
put into a proper data value chain. This requires both skills and IT
investments for the long-term benefit of businesses. However, such spending is
beyond the capacity of most SMEs due to their limited resources and restricted
access to finances. This paper presents lessons learned from a case study of 53
UK SMEs, mostly from the West Midlands region of England, supported as part of
a 3-year ERDF project, Big Data Corridor, in the areas of big data management,
analytics and related IT issues. Based on our study's sample companies, several
perspectives including the digital technology trends, challenges facing the UK
SMEs, and the state of their adoption in data analytics and big data, are
presented in the paper.
