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 Center for Digital Business, 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). His most recent book is Big Data@Work, from Harvard Business Review Press.
Some organizations I visit don’t seem to have changed their analytics technology environment much since the early days of IT. I often encounter companies with 70s-era base statistical packages running on mainframes or large servers, data warehouses (originated in the 80s), and lots of reporting applications. These tools usually continue
