Thomas 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 Initiative on the Digital Economy, 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).

Tom, a frequent innovator in the management literature, 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 published an HBR lead article in 2015 called “Beyond Automation”—which editors named one of the best of that year—and a book from Harper Business in 2016 called Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines.

Professor Davenport has written or edited eighteen books and over 100 articles for Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, the Financial Times, and many other publications. He writes regularly for the online sites of The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review. 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.