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f Big data is big news, and large companies in all sectors are making significant advances in their customer relations, product selection and development and consequent profitability through using this valuable commodity. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have proved themselves to be slow adopters of the new technology of big data analytics and are in danger of being left behind. In Europe, SMEs are a vital part of the economy, and the challenges they encounter need to be addressed as a matter of urgency. This paper identifies barriers to SME uptake of big data analytics and recognises their complex challenge to all stakeholders, including national and international policy makers, IT, business management and data science communities.The paper proposes a big data maturity model for SMEs as a first step towards an SME roadmap to data analytics. It considers the 'state-of-the-art' of IT with respect to usability and usefulness for SMEs and discusses how SMEs can overcome the barriers preventing them from adopting existing solutions. The paper then considers management perspectives and the role of maturity models in enhancing and structuring the adoption of data analytics in an organisation. The history of total quality management is reviewed to inform the core aspects of implanting a new paradigm. The paper concludes with recommendations to help SMEs develop their big data capability and enable them to continue as the engines of European industrial and business success.

Given a directed social graph and a set of past information cascades observed over the graph, we study the novel problem of detecting modules of the graph (communities of nodes), that also explain the cascades. Our key observation is that both information propagation and social ties formation in a social network can be explained according to the same latent factor, which ultimately guide a user behavior within the network. Based on this observation, we propose the Community-Cascade Network (CCN) model, a stochastic mixture membership generative model that can fit, at the same time, the social graph and the observed set of cascades. Our model produces overlapping communities and for each node, its level of authority and passive interest in each community it belongs.For learning the parameters of the CCN model, we devise a Generalized Expectation Maximization procedure. We then apply our model to real-world social networks and information cascades: the results witness the validity of the proposed CCN model, providing useful insights on its significance for analyzing social behavior.