Thomas Hayes "Tom" Davenport, Jr. (born October 17, 1954) is an American academic and author specializing in analytics, business process innovation, knowledge management, and artificial intelligence.
One of his most popular books (coauthored with Jeanne Harris), Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning,[2] provides guidelines for basing competitive strategies on the analysis of business data, and highlights several firms that do so.
[5] After graduating with a Ph.D. in Sociology, Davenport worked as an academic before being offered a research and consulting job at Index by James Champy.
Davenport's career experience, in addition to being a professor and consultant, included directing research centres for Accenture and Ernst & Young.
However, these organizations still rely on systems and processes that are inefficient, requiring an extraordinary amount of time to enable analysis to take place.