Thomas H. Davenport Quotes

Thomas Hayes "Tom" Davenport, Jr. is an American academic and author specializing in analytics, business process innovation and knowledge management. He is currently the President’s Distinguished Professor in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, Director of Research at the International Institute for Analytics, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics.

Davenport has written, coauthored, or edited sixteen books, including the first books on analytical competition, business process reengineering and achieving value from enterprise systems, and the best seller, Working Knowledge , on knowledge management. He has written more than one hundred articles for such publications as Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, the Financial Times, and many other publications. Davenport has also been a columnist for CIO, InformationWeek, and Darwin magazines.

In 2003, Davenport was named one of the world’s 'Top 25 Consultants' by Consulting magazine, and in 2005 was named one of the world’s top three analysts of business and technology by readers of Optimize magazine.

One of his most popular books , Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning , provides guidelines for basing competitive strategies on the analysis of business data, and highlights several firms that do so.

Davenport was the co-author in 2013, with Randy Bean and Paul Barth, of an early seminal article on Big Data, “How Big Data is Different”, in the MIT Sloan Management Review.

✵ 17. October 1954

Thomas H. Davenport: 11 quotes 0 likes

Famous Thomas H. Davenport Quotes

“In definitional terms, a process is simply a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action.”

Thomas H. Davenport

Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology, 1993

“James March, a Stanford-based social scientist… is much more a gurus’ guru than a guru to the general public. He finished second on the gurus’ gurus list and 48th on the original list.”

Thomas H. Davenport

Laurence Prusak, Thomas H. Davenport, "Who Are the Gurus' Gurus," Harvard Business Review Survey, December 2003, p.14–16

“Ultimately, knowledge worker performance comes down to the behaviors of individual knowledge workers.”

Thomas H. Davenport

Source: Thinking for a Living, 2005, p. 111

“Defined simply, innovation is, of course, the introduction of something new. We presume that the purpose of introducing something new into a process is to bring about major, radical change. Process innovation combines a structure for doing work with an orientation to visible and dramatic results. It involves stepping back from a process to inquire into its overall business objective, and then effecting creative and radical change to realize order-of-magnitude improvements in the way that objective is accomplished.”

Thomas H. Davenport

Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology, 1993

“Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.”

Thomas H. Davenport

Thomas H. Davenport and J.C. Beck (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Harvard Business School Press. p. 20

“Knowledge workers have high degrees of expertise, education, or experience, and the primary purpose of their jobs involves the creation, distribution or application of knowledge.”

Thomas H. Davenport

Source: Thinking for a Living, 2005, p. 9

“Companies should have well-defined procedures for dealing with the planned departure of a valued knowledge worker… Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that most firms are moving in the wrong direction on recruitment and retention issues.”

Thomas H. Davenport

Source: Thinking for a Living, 2005, p. 197

“In definitional terms, a process is simply a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what.”

Thomas H. Davenport

A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action.
Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology, 1993

Thomas H. Davenport Quotes about business

“Business process reengineering encompasses the envisioning of new work strategies, the actual process design activity, and the implementation of the change in all its complex technological, human, and organizational dimensions”

Thomas H. Davenport

Thomas H. Davenport, "Need radical innovation and continuous improvement? Integrate process reengineering and TQM." Planning Review 21.3 (1993): 6-12.

“Every decade or so, the business world invents another term for how it extracts managerial and decision-making value from computerized data. In the 1970s the favored term was “decision support systems,” accurately reflecting the importance of a decision-centered approach to data analysis. In the early 80s, “executive information systems” was the preferred nomenclature, which addressed the use of these systems by senior managers. Later in that decade, emphasis shifted to the more technical-sounding “online analytical processing,” or OLAP. The 90s saw the rise of “business intelligence” as a descriptor. In the middle of 2000’s first decade, “analytics” began to come into favor, at least for the more statistical and mathematical forms of data analysis.”

Thomas H. Davenport

Thomas H. Davenport. The New World of “Business Analytics”. International Institute for Analytics. March 2010

“Peter Drucker wasn’t exaggerating when he noted that the fate of advanced economies depends on making knowledge workers more productive. There is no business or economic issue that is more important to our long-term competitiveness and standard of living.”

Thomas H. Davenport

Source: Thinking for a Living, 2005, p.208

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