Thomas H. Davenport Quotes

to frame the decision, asking questions about the data and the methodology, working to understand the results, and using them to improve outcomes for your organization.

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.

It takes about twelve years for a pharmaceutical firm to research, develop, test, and launch a product. Several firms, including Pfizer, Novartis, and Celgene, are working with IBM Watson to try to identify and bring new drugs to market faster.

In Europe, a consortium of microelectronics companies, the Euro Pact for Skills, is devoting €2 billion to train current and future employees on electronic components and systems.

We believe that every large organization — and certainly those that are or aspire to be AI first — should designate smart people to follow AI technology trends, try out new technologies, and import them when they seem to fit the organization’s needs. These people don’t need to be fantastic data scientists or AI engineers, but they do need to understand the key technologies in AI and how they support use cases and business needs.

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.

The availability of all this data means that virtually every business or organizational activity can be viewed as a big data problem or initiative. Manufacturing, in which most machines already have one or more microprocessors, is increasingly a big-data environment. Consumer marketing, with myriad customer touchpoints and clickstreams, is already a big data problem. Google has even described its self-driving car as a big-data project.

The moment a realm of intellectual activity is codifiable, it ceases to be uniquely human.

UPS are replacing fixed daily routes with dynamic ones adjusted in real time for weather and traffic — again with machine learning. Only cognitive technologies can handle all the necessary data. And at some point supply chains may be powered by autonomously driven trucks, which will bring enormous changes to that domain.

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

Another AI-oriented company that has established several ecosystems — also in partnership with Palantir, in which it has made a substantial investment — is SOMPO Holdings, a large insurance and elder care company based in Japan. SOMPO

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

the use of statistical process control tools to evaluate variation, correlate root cause, forecast capacity, and anticipate throughput barriers. By measuring incidence of preventable venous

That was one of the reasons why Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center decided to work with Watson — to make widely available the level of knowledge of the hospital’s best oncologists to the world at large.

The businesses and organizations that succeed with AI will be those that invest steadily, rise above the hype, make a good match between their business problems and the capabilities of AI, and take the long view.