Tom Davenport

Tom Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, the co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a Fellow of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He teaches analytics and big data in executive programs at Babson, Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School, and Boston University. He pioneered the concept of “competing on analytics” with his best-selling 2006 Harvard Business Review article (and his 2007 book by the same name). His most recent book is Big Data@Work, from Harvard Business Review Press. It surprises no one that Tom has once again branched into an exciting new topic. He has extended his work on analytics and big data to its logical conclusion–what happens to us humans when smart machines make many important decisions? Davenport and Julia Kirby, his frequent editor at Harvard Business Review, published the lead/cover article in the HBR June 2015 issue. Called “Beyond Automation,” it’s the first article to focus on how individuals and organizations can add value to the work of cognitive technologies. It argues for “augmentation”–people and machines working alongside each other–over automation. Davenport and Kirby will also publish a book on this topic with Harper Business in 2016.

Professor Davenport has written or edited seventeen books and over 100 articles for Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, the Financial Times, and many other publications. He also writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal’s Corporate Technology section. Tom has been named one of the top three business/technology analysts in the world, one of the 100 most influential people in the IT industry, and one of the world’s top fifty business school professors by Fortune magazine.

Tom earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in social science and has taught at the Harvard Business School, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Boston University, and the University of Texas at Austin.