  The adoption of data science brings vast benefits to Small and Medium-sized
Enterprises (SMEs) including business productivity, economic growth, innovation
and jobs creation. Data Science can support SMEs to optimise production
processes, anticipate customers' needs, predict machinery failures and deliver
efficient smart services. Businesses can also harness the power of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and Big Data and the smart use of digital technologies to
enhance productivity and performance, paving the way for innovation. However,
integrating data science decisions into an SME requires both skills and IT
investments. In most cases, such expenses are beyond the means of SMEs due to
limited resources and restricted access to financing. This paper presents
trends and challenges towards an effective data-driven decision making for
organisations based on a case study of 85 SMEs, mostly from the West Midlands
region of England. The work is supported as part of a 3 years ERDF (European
Regional Development Funded project) in the areas of big data management,
analytics and business intelligence. We present two case studies that
demonstrates the potential of Digitisation, AI and Machine Learning and use
these as examples to unveil challenges and showcase the wealth of current
available opportunities for SMEs.
