Thomas Hayes "Tom" Davenport, Jr. (born October 17, 1954) is an American academic, author, and consultant specializing in business analytics, business process innovation, knowledge management, and artificial intelligence in business.^[8] He earned a BA in Sociology from Trinity University in 1976, followed by an MA in 1979 and a PhD in 1980 from Harvard University, where his doctoral dissertation was titled Virtuous Pagans: Unreligious People in America. Davenport holds the position of President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where he has taught since 1999.^[10,40] In addition, he has served as a Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (since 2010), a senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics and Deloitte's Chief Data and AI Officer Program (including the Deloitte Analytics Institute in Berlin, Germany; since 2010), a Visiting Professor of the Practice of Leadership at Brown University's School of Professional Studies, and has held positions at Oxford Saïd (since 2020) and UVA Darden (since 2024).^[11,40] He is also recognized as a co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, though French Wikipedia identifies him as its research director.^[40]

Davenport's research focuses on business analytics, knowledge management, process innovation, and artificial intelligence, and he is known for introducing concepts such as Analytics 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. While French Wikipedia states that he has written, co-authored, or edited sixteen books, Afrikaans and Korean Wikipedia report that he has published twenty books. His major works include the first books on analytical competition, business process reengineering, and achieving value from enterprise systems, with titles including Process Innovation (1993), Only Humans Need Apply (2016), The AI Advantage (2018), and All In on AI (2023). He co-authored the bestselling book on knowledge management, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know, with Larry Prusak, as well as Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning (2007; revised in 2017 with Jeanne Harris), which provides guidelines for competitive strategies based on business data analytics and highlights several firms that apply them.^[41]

Davenport has written more than a hundred articles for prominent publications such as Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, and the Financial Times.^[9] He has also served as a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, CIO, InformationWeek, and Forbes magazines.^[42] In addition, he has taught analytics courses in executive programs at the Dartmouth and Harvard business schools, as well as at Boston, Chicago, and Texas universities, and is one of the authors of the BizOps Manifesto.^[3]

In 2003, Davenport was named one of the world's 'Top 25 Consultants' by Consulting magazine; in 2005, he was named one of the world's top three business and technology analysts by the readers of Optimize magazine; and in 2012, he was named one of the world's 'Top 50 Business School Professors' by Poets and Quants and Fortune Magazine.^[43,44] His other honors include the C. Jackson Grayson Award (2014), the NASSCOM Global Leadership Award (2014), induction into the Analytics Hall of Fame (2019), and Research.com Leader Awards in 2022 and 2023. Davenport has two sons: Hayes Davenport, a television comedy writer and podcast producer residing in Los Angeles, and Chase Davenport, who manufactures surfboards and conducts artificial intelligence research in San Francisco.^[1,2]

Davenport initially trained as a sociologist, completing his undergraduate education at Trinity University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology in 1976, graduating magna cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.^[4,12,14] He pursued graduate studies at Harvard University, where he received a Master of Arts in Sociology in 1979 and completed his Ph.D. in Sociology in 1980.^[4] He also completed the Business Program for Ph.D.s at Harvard in 1982. His doctoral dissertation, "Virtuous Pagans: Unreligious People in America," was later selected for publication in Garland Publishing's "Outstanding Harvard Dissertations" series in 1992.

After graduating with a Ph.D. in Sociology, Davenport worked as an academic before being offered a research and consulting position at Index by James Champy.^[5] Davenport became Director of Research at Index, which studied business process improvement.^[6] Part of this research was a multi-client research program that Index and Hammer operated through an industry research consortium called PRISM – Partnership for Research in Information Systems Management, with Davenport serving as the program director. In 1988, PRISM conducted interviews with 100 companies regarding the ways information technology could improve cross-functional processes, and business process redesign emerged from this research.

Following CSC Index's work with business process engineering, Davenport made contributions to knowledge management and the attention economy before going on to contribute to the field of data analytics and artificial intelligence. In addition to being a professor and consultant, Davenport's career experience included leading research centers for Accenture and Ernst & Young.^[7] He is currently the President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College.^[8]

Following his doctoral studies, Davenport began his career in academia before transitioning to management consulting. In the mid-1980s, he joined Index Group (later CSC Index) as Director of Research, where his work contributed to the development of business process reengineering.^[6] Through a multiclient research program called PRISM (Partnership for Research in Information Systems Management), Davenport and his colleagues interviewed 100 companies about how information technology could improve cross-functional processes, research that became foundational to the reengineering movement.^[5] His 1990 article with James Short in MIT Sloan Management Review, "The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign" and his 1993 book Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology were the first article and book on the topic and established him as a thought leader in the field. He later critiqued some of the excesses of the reengineering movement in his 1995 Fast Company article "The Fad that Forgot People."^[15]

In the late 1990s, Davenport shifted focus to knowledge management, co-authoring Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know with Larry Prusak in 1998. The book received the Library Journal's Best Business Book award for 1997 and established fundamental principles for the emerging field.^[16] Professional reviews praised its practical approach, with PC Week noting it "provides a strong, fundamental grounding in many of the concepts that are critical to understanding knowledge management."^[17]

Davenport's most influential contribution came with his 2006 Harvard Business Review article "Competing on Analytics," which the journal's editors later named one of the twelve "must read" articles in HBR's 100-year history.^[18,19] The article introduced the concept of analytics as a source of competitive advantage and led to a book of the same name co-authored with Jeanne Harris in 2007. The book sold over 100,000 copies and was translated into 13 languages, with CIO Insight including it among "the most provocative, engaging business books of all-time."^[20]

In his writing for the Harvard Business Review, Davenport developed a framework summarizing the evolution and three maturity levels of analytics: Analytics 1.0 (traditional business intelligence), Analytics 2.0 (big data era), and Analytics 3.0 (data-enriched offerings). This framework has been widely adopted in business and academic contexts.^[9] Analytics 1.0 organizations are those where management has gained the ability to rely on internal data for decision-making rather than mere intuition, though they still rely on inefficient systems and processes that require an extraordinary amount of time to enable analysis. Analytics 2.0 companies combine internal data with externally sourced data to provide predictive capabilities, a "big data" evolution that Davenport notes was driven mainly by internet firms with the ability to work with large amounts of data. According to Davenport, we now find ourselves in the third analytics era where companies from any industry are increasingly "competing on analytics". Under Analytics 3.0, the premise is that the many activities a firm performs generate data trails that can be collected and analyzed to create and capture incremental value through much more accurate decision-making. More significantly, analytical capabilities are now a fundamental driver in the creation of increasingly valuable products and services, with Davenport arguing that in many cases analytical power is built directly into the product and service itself.

As artificial intelligence gained prominence in business applications, Davenport became interested in practical AI implementation. In 2016, he co-authored Only Humans Need Apply with Julia Kirby, addressing concerns about automation's impact on employment.^[22] His 2018 book The AI Advantage, published in cooperation with MIT Sloan Management Review, was praised by business publications as an essential guide for organizations implementing AI.^[21] He has since co-authored six other books on AI topics, including Working with AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration (MIT Press, 2022); Advanced Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (Elgar, 2022); All In on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence (co-authored with Nitin Mittal, Harvard Business Review Press, 2023); All Hands on Tech: The AI-Powered Citizen Revolution (Wiley, 2024); Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work, and Life (Irreplaceable Publishing, 2025); and The New Science of Customer Relationships: Fulfilling the One-to-One Promise with AI (Wiley, 2025).^{[28,23,24,25,26,27]}

Davenport's work has significantly influenced business practices across industries, with major corporations including Capital One, Netflix, Amazon, and Progressive Insurance implementing analytics strategies based on his frameworks.^[29] According to Google Scholar, his work has been cited by over 167,000 scholars as of 2025.^[30] In 2019, when the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) named him their inaugural Distinguished Research Fellow, Chairman Carla O'Dell stated: "Tom Davenport has been at the forefront of every major management innovation for 30 years and is one of the world's top business gurus... His is a voice of reason amid the inevitable hyperbole that accompanies every 'next big thing' in management."^[31]

In 2022 and 2023, Research.com recognized Davenport with their Business and Management in United States Leader Award.^[32] The Analytics Hall of Fame inducted him as a Global Leader in 2019.^[33] He was recognized as LinkedIn's #1 Voice in Education in 2016 and as a Top Voice in Technology in 2018.^[34] Davenport won the NASSCOM Global Leadership Award for Thought Leadership in 2014, the C. Jackson Grayson Quality Pioneer Award from the American Productivity and Quality Center in 2014, and was included in Fortune magazine's Top 50 Business Professors in the World list in 2012. In 2007, Ziff-Davis publications named him one of the 100 most influential people in the IT industry, where he ranked as the highest business academic.^[12] Additionally, Consulting Magazine recognized him as one of the world's "Top 25 Consultants" in 2003, and CIO Magazine named him one of 10 "Masters of the New Economy" in 2000.

Davenport has co-authored or edited more than two dozen books, including publications on analytical competition, business process reengineering, and achieving enterprise systems value, and also wrote the bestseller "Working Knowledge" with co-author Laurence Prusak. In addition, he has written more than one hundred articles for publications such as "Harvard Business Review", "MIT Sloan Management Review", "California Management Review", and "Financial Times". Currently, Davenport is a columnist for "The Wall Street Journal", "CIO", "InformationWeek", and "Forbes".

In 2015, co-authored with Julia Kirby, he published a breakthrough article titled "Beyond Automation", as well as the book "Only Humans Need Apply" (Ukrainian: "Vacancy: Human. How Not to Be Left Without a Job in the Age of Artificial Intelligence"). The latter was translated and published in Ukrainian by the publishing house "Nash Format" in 2018. One of Thomas Davenport's recent works, "The Advantage of AI: how to put Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work", focuses on the topic of using artificial technologies in business.

In 2003, "Consulting" magazine named Davenport one of the "Top 25 Consultants in the World", and in 2005, readers of "Optimize" magazine named him one of the top three business and technology analysts in the world. Today, Thomas Davenport is ranked among the top 50 business school professors in the world according to "Poets and Quants" and "Fortune" magazines. Today, he is recognized as one of the world's 100 most influential people in the IT industry, working with various well-known companies and startups in the field of analytics and artificial intelligence.^[45]

Early publications include Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology (Harvard Business School Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-87584-366-6), Information Ecology: Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment with Laurence Prusak (Oxford University Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0-19-511168-7), and Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know, also co-authored with Laurence Prusak (Harvard Business School Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-87584-655-1). These were followed by The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business with John C. Beck (Harvard Business School Press, 2001, ISBN 978-1-57851-441-1) and Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers (Harvard Business School Press, 2005, ISBN 978-1-59139-423-0).

Subsequent works on data and analytics include Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning with Jeanne G. Harris (Harvard Business Review Press, 2007; revised 2017, ISBN 978-1-63369-272-7) and Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results with Jeanne Harris and Robert Morison (Harvard Business Review Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4221-7769-3). Further books on this theme comprise Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics with Jinho Kim (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-4221-8725-8) and Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Discovering the Opportunities (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4221-6816-5).

Publications exploring artificial intelligence include Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines with Julia Kirby (Harper Business, 2016, ISBN 978-0-06-243861-0), The AI Advantage: How to Put the Revolution in Artificial Intelligence to Work (MIT Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0-262-03917-6), and Working with AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration with Steven Miller (MIT Press, 2022, ISBN 978-0-262-04704-1). More recent titles are All In on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence with Nitin Mittal (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023, ISBN 978-1-64782-467-5) and The New Science of Customer Relationships with Jim Sterne (Wiley, 2025, ISBN 978-1-119-91234-5).

Selected articles include "The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign", co-authored with J. E. Short and published in the Sloan Management Review in Summer 1990, which won the Edgar Schein Award for best article on planned change. Contributions to Harvard Business Review include "Competing on Analytics" (January 2006), "Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century" co-authored with D.J. Patil (October 2012), and "Analytics 3.0" (December 2013). Subsequent articles in Harvard Business Review include "Artificial Intelligence for the Real World" with Rajeev Ronanki (Jan-Feb 2018) and "How to Marry Process Management and AI" with Tom Redman (Jan-Feb 2025).

While English Wikipedia states that Davenport has two sons, Ukrainian Wikipedia states that he has a son.^[46] Hayes Davenport is a television comedy writer and podcaster who lives in Los Angeles.^[1,46] Chase Davenport works as a researcher and consultant on coastal science issues in San Francisco and has co-authored articles on artificial intelligence applications.^[2]