Top 15 Thomas H. Davenport Quotes

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

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.

In an attempt to develop a tool to help organizations begin to identify these errors, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) developed a global trigger tool (GTT).9 Briefly, the GTT provides a standard methodology for reviewing patient records for triggers, or indicators, of potential adverse events.

Peter Drucker wasn’t exaggerating when he noted that the fate of advanced economies depends on making knowledge workers more productive. There is no business or economic issue that is more important to our long-term competitiveness and standard of living.

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.

Ultimately, knowledge worker performance comes down to the behaviors of individual knowledge workers.

Knowledge workers have high degrees of expertise, education, or experience, and the primary purpose of their jobs involves the creation, distribution or application of knowledge.

Defined simply, innovation is, of course, the introduction of something new. We presume that the purpose of introducing something new into a process is to bring about major, radical change. Process innovation combines a structure for doing work with an orientation to visible and dramatic results. It involves stepping back from a process to inquire into its overall business objective, and then effecting creative and radical change to realize order-of-magnitude improvements in the way that objective is accomplished.

In definitional terms, a process is simply a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action.

Every decade or so, the business world invents another term for how it extracts managerial and decision-making value from computerized data. In the 1970s the favored term was “decision support systems,” accurately reflecting the importance of a decision-centered approach to data analysis. In the early 80s, “executive information systems” was the preferred nomenclature, which addressed the use of these systems by senior managers. Later in that decade, emphasis shifted to the more technical-sounding “online analytical processing,” or OLAP. The 90s saw the rise of “business intelligence” as a descriptor. In the middle of 2000’s first decade, “analytics” began to come into favor, at least for the more statistical and mathematical forms of data analysis.

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.

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.

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

Similarly, one of the most popular HR tools at GE Digital — an early adopter of AI for manufacturing applications — shows workers which jobs in the company are natural next steps from the ones they have now.12 Employees can look privately at the tool to see possible paths they can follow, skills they may need to acquire, or even positions that are open. This helps employees feel that they have more opportunities and that they have more control over their positions in the company.

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