Thomas Davenport: Profiles in Knowledge

Originally published on June 5, 2018

This is the 21st article in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Tom Davenport is one of the key figures in the field, having co-written (with Larry Prusak) one of its most important books, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know, which was very important to me when starting out in knowledge management.

I first heard Tom speak at DCI’s Knowledge Management Conference in Boston in 1998, at which he was the chairman and delivered a keynote, “From Data to Knowledge.” I was fortunate to have attended multiple Working Knowledge Research Center conferences at Babson College, where I got to know Tom better. I invited Tom and Larry Prusak to stage a debate at a global KM team meeting that I led at HP, and it was a highlight for all who attended. When I was at Deloitte, Tom became a senior advisor for Deloitte Analytics, but we never had the chance to work together.

Background

Tom Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, cofounder of the International Institute for Analytics, Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He teaches analytics/big data in executive programs at Babson, Harvard Business School and School of Public Health, and MIT Sloan School.

Davenport pioneered the concept of “competing on analytics” with his best-selling 2006 Harvard Business Review article and 2007 book. His most recent book (with Julia Kirby) is Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines. He wrote or edited seventeen other books and over 100 articles for Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, The Financial Times, and many other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. He has been named one of the top 25 consultants by Consulting News, one of the 100 most influential people in the IT industry by Ziff-Davis, and one of the world’s top fifty business school professors by Fortune magazine.

• Babson College: Professor, 2004 — Present
• MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy: Research Fellow, 2011 — Present
• Deloitte Analytics: Senior Advisor, 2010 — Present
• Harvard Business School: Visiting Professor, 2012–2013
• Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation: Partner and Director of Research, 1998–2004
• Accenture Institute for Strategic Change: Partner and Director, 1998–2003
• Amos Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College: Visiting Professor, 2001–2002
• Boston University School of Management: Professor, 1998–2000
• University of Texas at Austin: Director, Center for Customer Insights. Curtis Mathes Fellowship, 1994–1998
• Boston University: Adjunct Professor, 1992–1994
• McKinsey and Company: Director of IT Research and consultant, 1989–1990
• Harvard Business School: Senior Research Associate, 1988–1989
• CSC Index: Principal and Director of Research, 1983–1988
• Harvard University: Lecturer, 1981–1983
• University of Chicago: Assistant Professor, 1980–1981
• PhD, Harvard University, Sociology, 1980
• MA, Harvard University, Sociology, 1979
• BA, Trinity University, Sociology, 1976

Profiles

1. Tom’s Site
2. Babson College
3. MIT
4. Deloitte
5. Wikipedia
6. LinkedIn
7. Lucidea’s Lens

Content

1. Twitter

2. Articles

• Digital
• Published

3. Babson College Blog

• Webcast: Competing on Analytics
• Attention Bloggers!
• Building Your Company’s Innovation Portfolio
• You Know You Compete on Analytics When…
• Was Drucker Wrong?
• The Backlash to Process
• Personal Knowledge Management
• Reflecting on KM-World…
• Knowledge Management: Broadening and Narrowing
• The Importance of Knowledge Workers in a Global Economy
• Knowledge Management Lives!
• 6 Common Attributes of Knowledge Work and Knowledge Workers

1. Knowledge workers like autonomy
2. Specifying the detailed steps and flow of knowledge-intensive processes is less valuable and more difficult than for other types of work.
3. “You can observe a lot by watching.”
4. Knowledge workers usually have good reasons for doing what they do.
5. Commitment matters.
6. Knowledge workers value their knowledge, and don’t share it easily.

• Analyze This
• The Babson Knowledge Blog

4. Fortune Articles

• What Governments Can Do When Robots Take Our Jobs
• How Big Data Is Helping the NYPD Solve Crimes Faster

5. LinkedIn Articles

• Whatever Happened to Knowledge Management? — WSJ version
• What We Talk About When We Talk About AI
• The Next Logical Step Past Analytics Is Cognitive Computing
• Cognitive applications: Home runs versus base hits
• Lessons from the Cognitive Front Lines: Early Adopters of IBM’s Watson
• Purple people: The heart of cognitive systems engineering
• Cognitive technologies all set to transform business processes
• Building Your Cognitive Technology
• Cognitive Technology: The rise of “bionic brains”
• Learn to stop worrying and love the smart machines you’ll be working alongside in the future

6. CIO Articles

• Analyze This
• Known Evils: Common pitfalls of Knowledge Management — The Seven Deadly Syndromes of Knowledge Management: Repent and save your company from its witless ways

1. If We Build It… They will come.
2. Let’s Put the Personnel Manual Online!
3. None Dare Call it Knowledge
4. Every Man a Knowledge Manager
5. Justification by Faith
6. Restricted Access
7. Bottoms Up!

7. Forbes Articles

8. Wall Street Journal Articles

• The Myth of the Data Scientist Shortage
• Cracking the Operational Analytics Nut
• The Shift to a New Data Architecture

9. Harvard Business Review Articles

• 7 Ways to Introduce AI into Your Organization
• Just-in-Time Delivery Comes to Knowledge Management
• Analytics at Work: A Conversation with Tom Davenport
• If Only BP Knew Now What it Knew Then with Laurence Prusak
• Who Are the Gurus’ Gurus? with Laurence Prusak: Two hundred of today’s leading management thinkers were asked to identify their gurus. The result is an illuminating list, notable for some of the less obvious names it contains.
• Who’s Bringing You Hot Ideas (and How Are You Responding)? with Laurence Prusak and H. James Wilson: There’s an unsung hero in your organization. It’s the person who’s bringing in new ideas from the outside about how to manage better.
• From Producers to Consumers, Part I — I was reading Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick, which is about how to ensure that your ideas get noticed and acted upon. I was already a believer (John Beck and I wrote The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business in 2001, and it included some similar ideas, but was perhaps before its time — and just before 9/11), but the Heaths’ book made me realize how far things had moved toward the consumer side.
• Recession: The Next Big Thing? — Given that we haven’t figured out how to avoid business cycles, we’re going to have a recession eventually. And given what’s happening in the housing market, it’s a pretty good bet that it will happen sooner rather than later. It’s certainly not too early to begin planning for how your organization will manage through a recession. I’m hoping this time for a more enlightened approach to recession-oriented management. Gone, I hope, will be the managerial conservatism, the mindless cutbacks, the early retirement offers to everyone with a pulse, the fire-sale pricing. We can do better, so let’s try. Managers always get cautious during recessions. The only ideas that appeal are how to cut costs. Gone is the interest in innovation and building the top line. Of course, this is an attitude that prolongs the downturn for the overall economy, and it slows the rate at which particular companies emerge from the fiscal funk. The best companies, like General Electric and McKinsey, accelerate innovation during recessions. They know that their people have a little more time to think, and they encourage them to think boldly and creatively.

10. MIT Sloan Management Review Articles

• Just How Smart Are Smart Machines?
• What’s Your Cognitive Strategy?
• Cognitive Technologies
• Successful Knowledge Management Projects

11. California Management Review Articles

• Managing Customer Support Knowledge with Philip Klahr
• Data to Knowledge to Results: Building an Analytic Capability with Jeanne G. Harris, David W. De Long, and Alvin L. Jacobson

12. Successful Knowledge Management Projects with David W. De Long and Michael C. Beers

13. What Is a Knowledge Management Project? with David De Long and Mike Beers

14. Is KM Just Good Information Management? with Donald A. Marchand

15. If Only HP Knew What HP Knows — “Trainer’s Trading Post” is a Lotus Notes-based forum to help HP’s thousands of internal trainers and educators share ideas, materials, and methods. This group obviously appreciates the value of knowledge transfer, but motivating them to participate still requires an “evangelist.”

16. Ten principles of knowledge management and four case studies

17. Some Principles of Knowledge Management

18. General Perspectives on Knowledge Management: Fostering a Research Agenda with Varun Grover — PDF

Articles by Others

1. APQC CEO Carla O’Dell spoke with Thomas Davenport as part of the “Big Thinkers, Big Ideas” interview series
2. Smart Machines: Could This End Badly for Knowledge Workers? Interviewed by Carla O’Dell
3. What is KM? Knowledge Management Explained by Michael E.D. Koenig — The classic one-line definition of Knowledge Management was offered up by Tom Davenport early on (1994): “Knowledge Management is the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.” Probably no better or more succinct single-line definition has appeared since.

Older Published Work

1. Strategies for Preventing a Knowledge-Loss Crisis
2. Why Office Design Matters
3. Rethinking The Mobile Workforce
4. Automated Decision Making Comes of Age
5. The Coming Commoditization of Processes
6. Decision Evolution
7. Why Don’t We Know More About Knowledge?
8. Decoding Information-Worker Productivity
9. The Social Side of Performance
10. Turning Mind Into Matter
11. Toward an Innovation Sourcing Strategy
12. Withering Heights
13. A Measurable Proposal
14. Innovation Sourcing Strategy Matters
15. Innovation: A Little Help From Their Friends
16. Data to Knowledge to Results: Building an Analytic Capability
17. The Mysterious Art and Science of Knowledge-Worker Performance
18. Just-in-Time Delivery Comes to Knowledge Management
19. The Art of Work: Facilitating the Effectiveness of High-End Knowledge Workers
20. A ‘Bifocal’ Approach to Enterprise Solutions
21. AttentionScape
22. How Do They Know Their Customers So Well?
23. The Attention Economy
24. The New, New IT Strategy
25. Cut Us Some Slack
26. Attention Must Be Paid!
27. Nets Upon Nets

Putting Ideas to Work with Laurence Prusak and Bruce Strong — WSJ

Knowledge management can make a difference — but it needs to be more pragmatic

Over the past 15 years or so, many large organizations have embraced the idea that they could become more productive and competitive by better managing knowledge — the ideas, insights and expertise that originate in the human mind.

In practice, however, some of them are still struggling to make it work. Their knowledge-management efforts, while useful in some ways, haven’t necessarily led to better products and services, more effective employees or superior work processes.

What went wrong? Some firms stumbled by focusing their knowledge-management efforts solely on technology at the expense of everything else, while others failed to tie knowledge programs to overall business goals or the organization’s other activities. A new approach is needed if knowledge management is to transition into a more pragmatic discipline, one that can be used to improve specific job functions and work processes.

Back to School

• The Issue: Knowledge management, in practice, has fallen short of its goal of transforming the way companies work.
• The Problem: Many firms have focused solely on disseminating knowledge via technology, ignoring the other aspects of knowledge management.
• The Bottom Line: Organizations need a broader management strategy, one that addresses how they are creating, sharing and using knowledge.

We define knowledge management as a concerted effort to improve how knowledge is created, delivered and used, and we propose that organizations adopt a management strategy that addresses each of those three key activities. By doing so, we believe they will stand a better chance of reaping knowledge management’s full benefits.

There is no single recipe for managing knowledge; the right formula depends on the organization’s overall objectives. So while firms in highly competitive industries may choose to focus the majority of their efforts on knowledge creation because their survival depends on having the most advanced products, others, say those with far-flung operations, may be better off focusing on how best to disseminate existing know-how to diverse work forces. Still others may choose to pursue all three activities aggressively.

Whichever aspect of knowledge a company pursues, it is important to focus it on particular jobs or business processes. As an example, the engineering and consulting firm MWH Global, based in Broomfield, Colo., has more than 7,000 employees around the world but focuses its knowledge creation, dissemination and usage activities on six job families that it has determined are critical to its success.

Here is a closer look at each of the three knowledge-related activities and suggestions for managing them effectively.

Knowledge Creation

Under old approaches, organizations often didn’t manage knowledge creation in any formal way. They left it to their research-and-development or new-product groups, which weren’t that familiar with the process because they were focused on the creation of products, not the underlying knowledge necessary to develop them.

But as the hypercompetitive markets of China and India produce new products, services and ways of doing business that are having a profound impact on all economies, organizations are taking a greater interest in knowledge creation to spur innovation.

The organizations with the best knowledge-creation programs define in advance the type of information they need and why they need it — say to improve customer service or to develop easier-to-use products. They solicit ideas, insights and innovations from rank-and-file workers, customers and business partners, rather than relying solely on the R&D staff to come up with the ideas. Technologies such as internal corporate blogs and wikis — which are collaborative Web sites where anyone can edit, delete or modify content — are encouraging this broader participation in knowledge creation.

Nokia Corp., the mobile-phone maker based in Finland, has benefited from having a knowledge-creation strategy that extends far beyond corporate headquarters. To take advantage of innovations in local offices around the globe, Nokia has set up Web sites and several different wikis to encourage employees to share what they know. Researchers are urged to record their observations in blogs and collaborate with universities, design firms, and telecommunications-industry partners. The knowledge that comes out of these efforts, which ranges from technical know-how to a broader understanding of the way different cultures address mobility, has helped Nokia remain a leading player in the world’s mobile-phone market.

Consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble Co. is becoming well-known for its “Connect and Develop” strategy, where managers seek to identify and team up with other companies, universities, academics, retirees and individual inventors who have ideas or expertise that could help the Cincinnati-based company develop new products, technologies, packaging, design, business models or manufacturing processes. The result: More than 40% of P&G products have an externally sourced component, up from less than 10% just six years ago.

The World Bank, meanwhile, has nurtured a network of more than 5,000 lawyers, accountants, freight forwarders, architects and public officials across the world to create a comprehensive database of indicators allowing it to compare the ease of starting and sustaining private businesses in 178 countries. The “Doing Business Report” has become one of the most relied-upon tools in the development world.

Knowledge Dissemination

Disseminating knowledge via technology is the most common activity within knowledge management. Organizations share knowledge through a variety of platforms, including corporate intranets, Web portals and database-software programs.

Under old approaches, knowledge content often was collected, organized and displayed in its own repository, kept separate from more structured types of information like sales figures or corporate reports so as not to dilute its value. That thinking, however, forced employees to go to different Web sites and databases to get the information they needed to do their jobs.

In contemporary approaches to knowledge sharing, the focus increasingly is on putting in one place all of the content a specific group of workers needs, regardless of its source. To that end, many organizations are using Web portals or intranet sites as one-stop information shops designed to support the jobs or work processes they deem to be most critical.

Global engineering firm Fluor Corp. has a Web-based knowledge-management system that supports employees through 43 communities aligned with functional and industry-specific knowledge. The system gives more than 25,000 workers immediate access to all the procedures, guidelines and standards needed for their particular job function. An engineer of electrical power plants, for example, has access to designs, specifications and best practices for that kind of plant.

Intel Corp.’s Technology and Manufacturing Group has a content-distribution approach aimed at helping workers perform closely scrutinized tasks such as capital-equipment purchasing. So-called dashboards — which are Web pages set up to pull, organize and display real-time information from various sources — alert capital-equipment purchasers to critical transactions, price changes and anything else that might help them make decisions, such as when to buy a particular commodity.

Knowledge Application

Obtaining and sharing knowledge is beneficial only if employees use it to get better at what they do — that is, they learn from it.

Many organizations are finding that the best way to encourage workers to put knowledge to use is through “learning” programs — practices such as mentoring, on-the-job training, workshops and other initiatives that often are run by the human-resources department.

In the past, most companies treated knowledge and learning as separate entities. These functions were managed by different departments, and the groups didn’t coordinate their activities or work toward the same business objectives.

That is starting to change. A survey of 20 high-performing businesses conducted in 2006 provided strong evidence that learning and knowledge initiatives increasingly are being intertwined and targeted at mission-critical work forces.

Knowledge management was well established at 60% of the firms we interviewed, and just over half said their knowledge and learning programs were formally tied. A substantial majority of the companies — 70% — said their knowledge-management initiatives, well-established or not, were focused not on all employees equally, but on mission-critical work forces.

Some created and maintained “communities of practice,” a form of social learning that occurs when people with a common interest in some subject or problem are brought together to collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, solutions and innovations. The communities involved such online activities as wikis and blogs, in addition to face-to-face activities such as community meetings and a lecture series.

Educational Testing Service, a private educational testing and assessment organization in Princeton, N.J., has had success combining its knowledge and learning functions into a single group.

The group introduced the “After Action Review” process at the close of each project to review what happened on the job and what could be learned from it. The head of the Elementary and Secondary Education division at ETS credited the process with better-managed subcontractor relationships, more effective techniques in working with state departments, and improvements in processes used by test developers, publishers and data analysts.

There are, of course, other ways to think about knowledge and the role it should play at various organizations. But by focusing on knowledge creation, dissemination and application, organizations will at the very least ensure they are giving knowledge the attention it deserves. The stakes are high: As knowledge-based work plays an increasingly important role in economic life, knowledge will only grow in importance as a business resource over the coming years and decades.

Enterprise 2.0

1. Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?

2. Why Enterprise 2.0 Won’t Transform Organizations

3. January 11, 2008 Recording of Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport webinar discussion — Disagreement over Viability of Enterprise 2.0

4. A Bull in the Enterprise 2.0 China Shop by Tom Davenport

I felt like an atheist at a Baptist convention. I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston to debate Andrew McAfee, the movement’s high priest. My mission was to deny the existence of this faith-based initiative, or at least to argue that it’s not going to be our salvation.

I tried to make a few points:

• That it’s not even clear what Enterprise 2.0 is.
• That Enterprise 2.0 technologies will not, by themselves, revolutionize organizations and make them more democratic.
• That Enterprise 2.0 technologies produce too much content for their own good.
• That there is no business benefit from social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace other than giving people something to do at work when they get bored.

5. Watching the Film of the Fight by Andrew McAfee

I’ve just been looking over the (very high quality) video archive of the debate this morning between me and Tom Davenport over Enterprise 2.0, and I have to say it’s pretty good!

After one review of the video, it seems to me that our main point of disagreement concerned the extent to which the E2.0 toolkit really is something new, or whether it’s just an incremental extension to the longstanding set of technologies for collaboration, interaction, and information sharing. Tom stressed repeatedly that companies have been deploying such tools for decades, and he kept explicitly and implicitly asking the important question: what, if anything, is new now?

In my opening remarks and a few times subsequently, I tried to articulate my answer to this question: that digital platforms that initially impose little or no structure on interactions, but that contain mechanisms to let patterns and structure emerge over time, are actually quite new.

6. Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head by Andrew McAfee

I found myself in an uncomfortable position at the end of my short keynote speech during the Enterprise 2.0 conference yesterday. I got through my prepared material and still had about five minutes left in the allotted time. So I had to ad lib. The idea that occurred to me (from no identifiable source) was to make Enterprise 2.0 personal. I compared where my thinking was a year ago to where it was today, and tried to convey how big a shift had taken place.

7. Bill Ives: Davenport vs. McAfee on Enterprise 2.0

Much has been written about the “debate” between Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee on the role of enterprise 2.0 in changing the enterprise. Many, if not all, of you are aware of this but it has generated many interesting side conversations. Being part of the Fast Forward Enterprise 2.0 blog I seem to have only heard the views supporting the McAfee position or deconstructing the conversation to debunk connected myths.

Here is a recent useful example, More on corporate hierarchy and the organization of work, from Tom Mandel. He picks three myths around the debate and goes into them in detail.

Here is a post I finally did on the controversy, Managing Personal Knowledge: Setting a Foundation for Transformation? Here I tried to provide a more optimist interpretation of what Tom wrote. As I said, “I look at what Tom actually wrote and I think he nicely captures some of the organizational obstacles that will have to be overcome for organizations to effectively use enterprise 2.0 tools.”

Presentations

SlideShare

1. Analytics at Work: How to Make Better Decisions and Get Better Results

Thomas Davenport: Analytics at Work: How to Make Better Decisions and Get Better Results

2. Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning

Competing on Analytics The New Science of Winning Tom Davenport University of Houston ISRC November…

3. Analytics 3.0: Measurable business impact from analytics & big data

Analytics 3.0: Measurable Business Impact From Analytics & Big Data

Conferences

1. DCI’s Knowledge Management Conference — 1998

• Keynote Presentations: Chairman Address — From Data to Knowledge
• Talking knowledge management in Boston

1. Keynoter Tom Davenport, director of the Information Management Program at the University of Texas (Austin), said, “Knowledge is easier to digest than information.”
2. “The average customer database is outdated in a year,” said Davenport, adding, “Most companies build too much in a data warehouse — it’s easy to get in and difficult to get out.”

2. Inference’s Knowledge Summit ‘97

Inference hosted the Knowledge Summit ’97 user conference on November 9–14 at the Silverado Country Club and Resort in Napa, Calif. The conference emphasized the role and implementation of self service and knowledge management as growing business and technology trends. Among the keynote speakers are Fortune Magazine editor Thomas Stewart, and Dr. Thomas Davenport, director of the University of Texas’ Information Management Program. The summit also included a one-day conference on knowledge management, to be held November 10, drawing more than 100 executives, including CIOs and CKOs from Fortune 500 companies.

3. Conference Report by Michael E.D. Koenig

A wonderful quote that one speaker attributed to Tom Davenport is that of the need for “baking knowledge into the organization.”

4. KMWorld 2005 Opening Keynote: Thinking for a Living: Keys to Knowledge Worker Productivity

Peter Drucker has argued often that improving knowledge worker productivity is the most important task of the century. Yet we have few measures or management interventions to make such improvement possible. Most organizations simply hire smart people and leave them alone. In this discussion, Davenport presents six interventions for improving knowledge worker productivity, each with a set of approaches, examples, and cautions. The interventions combine roles for technology, organizational culture and behavior, and the physical work environment as tools for enhancing performance. His recommendations are based on research studies he has conducted on how companies have addressed knowledge work, both successfully and unsuccessfully.

5. SIKM Leaders Community — December, 2005: Thinking for a Living: Improving the Performance of Knowledge Workers

6. How to Do Knowledge Analytics — 2014 APQC KM Conference Keynote Address

Videos

1. Media

2. YouTube

3. Vimeo

4. Big Data and Analytics Right Now: An Experts Exchange

5. Analytics 3.0: Big Data and Small Data in Big and Small Companies

6. BI (Business Intelligence) Congress Keynote

7. Working with Artificial Intelligence

Books

• Amazon Author Page

Books on Knowledge, Thinking, and Decisions

1. Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know with Laurence Prusak

The definitive primer on knowledge management, this book will establish the enduring vocabulary and concepts and serve as the hands-on resource of choice for fast companies that recognize knowledge as the only sustainable source of competitive advantage. Drawing on their work with more than 30 knowledge-rich firms, the authors — experienced consultants with a track record of success — examine how all types of companies can effectively understand, analyze, measure, and manage their intellectual assets, turning corporate knowledge into market value. They consider such questions as: What key cultural and behavioral issues must managers address to use knowledge effectively?; What are the best ways to incorporate technology into knowledge work?; What does a successful knowledge project look like — and how do you know when it has succeeded? In the end, say the authors, the human qualities of knowledge — experience, intuition, and beliefs — are the most valuable and the most difficult to manage. Applying the insights of Working Knowledge is every manager’s first step on that rewarding road to long-term success.

Table of Contents

1. Chapter 1 — What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Knowledge
2. Chapter 2 — The Promise and Challenge of Knowledge Markets
3. Chapter 3 — Knowledge Generation
4. Chapter 4 — Knowledge Codification and Coordination
5. Chapter 5 — Knowledge Transfer
6. Chapter 6 — Knowledge Roles and Skills
7. Chapter 7 — Technologies for Knowledge Management
8. Chapter 8 — Knowledge Management Projects in Practice
9. Chapter 9 — The Pragmatics of Knowledge Management

Reviews

• Ron Young: Most of the KM practitioners use this book as a reference. Practical issues of how companies can generate and transfer knowledge. A blueprint for competitive advantage.
• Denham Grey: Davenport and Prusak’s 1998 primer for the KM practitioner. This covers the essential concepts of codification and personalization, the role of people vs. technology and the value of knowledge to business.

2. Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances and Results from Knowledge Workers

Addresses many topics related to PKM (also see Tom’s article Personal Knowledge Management). In Chapter 6, Developing Individual Knowledge Worker Capabilities, he lists ten common attributes of individuals who are highly effective in managing their own personal information environments:

1. they avoided gadgets
2. limited the number of separate devices
3. invested effort in organizing information
4. weren’t missionaries
5. got help
6. used assistants — to some degree
7. weren’t doctrinaire about paper versus electronic approaches
8. decided what information was important to them, and organized it particularly well
9. use lists
10. adapt the use of tools and approaches to the work situation at a given time

3. What’s the Big Idea? Creating and Capitalizing on the Best New Management Thinking with Laurence Prusak and H. James Wilson

The Secrets of Successful Idea Practitioners

Change management. Reengineering. Knowledge management. Major new management ideas are thrown at today’s companies with increasing frequency-and each comes with evangelizing gurus and eager-to-assist implementation consultants. Only a handful of these ideas will be a good fit for your organization. Choose the right idea at the right time and your company can become more efficient, more effective, and more innovative. Choose the wrong one-or jump on the right bandwagon too late-and your company could fall hopelessly behind.

Drawing from decades of consulting, academic, and business experience and from their novel study of more than 100 of these critical change leaders, What’s the Big Idea? offers tools and frameworks for:

• Assessing the merits of the top business gurus
• Scanning and tracking emerging ideas in the marketplace
• Distinguishing promising ideas from rhetoric
• Refining ideas to suit your organization’s particular needs
• Packaging and selling the idea internally
• Ensuring successful implementation

Google Book

Today’s organizations face an onslaught of new management ideas from the fast-growing “business advice industry.” Managers must determine whether to adopt an idea aggressively and risk fad-surfing or to sit on the sidelines too long and risk stagnation. The authors of What’s the Big Idea? argue that new business ideas can both improve organizational performance and bolster a company’s image as an innovative leader. The key is choosing the right ideas to implement — at the right time for a specific organization. Drawing from decades of consulting, academic and business experience, and their novel study of more than 100 “idea practitioners” — individuals who introduce and champion new ideas within organizations — the authors provide practical tools and frameworks for understanding where new ideas come from, evaluating which ideas are worth pursuing, customizing ideas to suit an organization’s unique needs, and more. Encouraging managers to embrace the power of ideas while avoiding the hype that often accompanies them, this book is a pragmatic guide to the art and practice of new management ideas.

Table of Contents

1. Ch. 1 Winning with Ideas: How Business Ideas Are Linked to Business Success 1
2. Ch. 2 The Idea Practitioners: Who Introduces Ideas to Organizations? 21
3. Ch. 3 Ideas at Work: It’s the Content That Counts 49
4. Ch. 4 The Guide to Gurus: Where Good Management Ideas Come From 69
5. Ch. 5 Market Savvy: How Ideas Interact with Markets 97
6. Ch. 6 Will It Fit?: Find Ideas That Fit Your Organization…Then Sell Them 123
7. Ch. 7 The Reengineering Tsunami: A Case Story of an Idea That Became a Tidal Wave 155
8. Ch. 8 Knowledge Management: A Case Story of a “P Cycle” Movement 179
9. Ch. 9 Idea-Based Leadership: How Can Your Organization Lead with Ideas? 195
10. App. A — A Select Survey of Business and Management Ideas 215
11. App. B — The Idea Practitioners 217
12. App. C — The Top Two Hundred Business Gurus 219

Reviews

• James Dellow
• Matt Moore
• James Robertson
• Inc.
• Bill Ives — This latest book by Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak provides some very practical advice and useful case examples on putting ideas to work. The central theme is the symbiotic relationship of the gurus, who generate ideas, and the idea practitioners, who enable sustained business impact from ideas.

4. Judgment Calls: Twelve Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams That Got Them Rightwith Brook Manville

5. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business with John C. Beck

6. Knowledge Management Case Book with Gilbert J. B. Probst

7. Information Ecology: Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment and Capitalizing on the Best New Management Thinking with Laurence Prusak

Books on Analytics

1. Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics with Jinho Kim

2. Analytics in Healthcare and the Life Sciences: Strategies, Implementation Methods, and Best Practices with Dwight McNeill

3. Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results with Jeanne Harris and Robert Morison

4. Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning (updated, with a new introduction) with Jeanne Harris

You have more information at hand about your business environment than ever before. But are you using it to “out-think” your rivals? If not, you may be missing out on a potent competitive tool. In “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning,” Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris argue that the frontier for using data to make decisions has shifted dramatically. Certain high-performing enterprises are now building their competitive strategies around data-driven insights that in turn generate impressive business results.

Their secret weapon? Analytics: sophisticated quantitative and statistical analysis and predictive modeling. Exemplars of analytics are using new tools to identify their most profitable customers and offer them the right price; accelerate product innovation; optimize supply chains; and identify the true drivers of financial performance. A wealth of examples — from organizations as diverse as Amazon, Barclay’s, Capital One, Harrah’s, Procter & Gamble, Wachovia, and the Boston Red Sox — illuminate how to leverage the power of analytics.

Table of Contents

Part One: The Nature of Analytical Competition

1. The Nature of Analytical Competition: Using Analytics to Build a Distinctive Capability

2. What Makes an Analytical Competitor?: Defining the Common Key Attributes of Such Companies

3. Analytics and Business Performance: Transforming the Ability to Compete on Analytics into a Lasting Competitive Advantage

4. Competing on Analytics with Internal Processes: Financial, Manufacturing, R&D, and Human Resource Applications

5. Competing on Analytics with External Processes: Customer and Supplier Applications

Part Two: Building an Analytical Capability

6. A Road Map to Enhanced Analytical Capabilities: Progressing Through the Five Stages of Development

7. Managing Analytical People: Cultivating the Scarce Ingredient That Makes Analytics Work

8. The Architecture of Business Intelligence: Aligning a Robust Technical Environment with Business Strategies

9. The Future of Analytical Competition: Approaches Driven by Technology, Human Factors, and Business Strategy

Books on Information Management and Big Data

1. Mastering Information Management edited with Donald Marchand
2. Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities

Books on Artificial Intelligence

1. Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines with Julia Kirby
2. The AI Advantage: How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work
3. Working with AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration with Steven M. Miller
4. All-in On AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence with Nitin Mittal

Books on Information Technology

1. Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology
2. Mission Critical: Realizing the Promise of Enterprise Systems with Marius Leibold

Book Chapters

1. Knowledge Management Handbook edited by Jay Liebowitz — Chapter 2: Knowledge Management and the Broader Firm: Strategy, Advantage, and Performance
2. Knowledge Creation and Management: New Challenges for Managers edited by Kazuo Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka — Chapter 7: Information Technologies for Knowledge Management