The Knowledge: Tom Davenport

What do knowledge management (KM), business process reengineering, information ecology, knowledge worker productivity, attention management and analytical competition have in common? They’ve all been recent management innovations; they take place at the intersection of people, information and knowledge and technology; and they are all the subject of pioneering work by Tom Davenport.
These and other big ideas would all be significantly less understood without the work of Davenport, who has published a dozen books and hundreds of articles. Davenport’s seminal work in new management domains has been going on since 1984 when he published his first business article.
He was trained as an academic sociologist, but shortly after receiving his PhD he decided he didn’t want to sit in his office and write papers for a few other sociologists to read. So he began to work with consulting firms as a researcher and consultant, and since then has swung back and forth between ‘thought leadership’ roles for big consultants like Accenture, Ernst & Young, and McKinsey and business schools such as Harvard, the University of Texas, and now Babson College.
At Babson he’s the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management. Few have crossed the line between theory and practice so easily and often. Davenport’s work on knowledge management, much of which involved collaboration with fellow Bostonian Larry Prusak, was both particularly early and influential.
The two authors began to collaborate on research and publication in the early 1990s, when they were both based at Ernst & Young’s Centre for Business Innovation. There they started in 1992 what they believe was the first sponsored research programme on KM (and they still run one today at Babson, with over 25 sponsors).
By 1998 they had published one of the first – and best-selling – books on KM, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know. Some have described this as the bible of the field, and it’s still largely current despite being more than a decade old.
Davenport followed his first book on KM with additional research and writing on many different facets of the topic. He’s devoted books and articles, for example, to:

The use of knowledge management in service processes;
The management of customer knowledge;
Managing information and knowledge about business processes;
The relationship between social networks and knowledge;
In-depth discussions of how knowledge management was implemented in particular companies (Siemens and Accenture);
Just in time knowledge management in health care;
Knowledge and intellectual asset re-use.

Bibliometric analyses reveal that Davenport’s books and articles on KM are second only to Japanese knowledge guru Ikujiro Nonaka as the most frequently cited by other writers in the field.
Davenport’s interest in KM was a natural outgrowth of his sociological bent and his interest in the intersection of technology and people. Some KM experts focus primarily on tools and technologies, while others (including Prusak) insist people are the only key to KM success. Davenport usually takes a position somewhere in the middle of this debate.
“We wouldn’t be talking about knowledge management without tools like portals, Lotus Notes and SharePoint,” he says. But he’s the first to point out that knowledge initiatives won’t succeed without behavioural and cultural change. “No doubt technology is the easy part,” he admits.
Davenport and Prusak stated a rule of thumb in Working Knowledge that many have employed over the years: if you’re spending more than a third of your efforts in KM on the technology, you’re probably neglecting the human side. Because Davenport also maintains a strong interest in business processes and their improvement, he has focused on how organisations can integrate KM with those processes.
“I know there were excesses committed under the name of reengineering, but I never saw the movement as incompatible with KM. I always argued that knowledge should be embedded in key business processes.”
Not many organisations have accomplished this integration, but Davenport uncovered and described one – Partners Healthcare in Boston – with regard to knowledge-based physician order entry systems (see Inside Knowledge article on decision management at Partners, December-January 2008).
“It’s very powerful when companies pull this off, even though it takes a lot of work,” says Davenport. “Partners has reduced drug errors by over 50 per cent using this approach.”
The combination of a knowledge and process orientation led Davenport to focus in depth on the productivity and effectiveness of knowledge workers. His book, Thinking for a Living, describes a number of ways organisations can address knowledge workers, including how they can manage their own personal knowledge more effectively. Davenport himself responds by saying, “I really admired Drucker, and we had some of the same interests. I visited him at his home once, which was a memorable experience. I wish I had his classical education … maybe if I’d been brought up in turn-of-the-century Vienna instead of 1950s Alabama I could have competed with him more effectively!”
He argues that knowledge management should be defined broadly if it’s to succeed over the long run. He feels a traditional focus on disseminating unstructured content is not broad enough for KM organisations to thrive. He believes they should also address knowledge work processes, knowledge derived from data (ie. business intelligence and analytics), knowledge transfer and acquisition (also known as learning), and knowledge creation (also known as R&D or innovation).
Davenport’s recent work on how companies compete on their analytical capabilities (described in a popular Harvard Business Review article and a best-selling book, both called Competing on Analytics) might not be classified as knowledge management by everyone, but it is for the author. “I’ve worked with several companies, including PNC Bank, SAS and Intel, who definitely view business intelligence as an aspect of knowledge management. After all, it’s just a process of turning data into knowledge – and then once it’s been transformed, it’s a piece of knowledge like any other.”
With colleagues Prusak and Bruce Strong, Davenport wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal article that this broader conception of KM is critical to its success.
However, they also feel that a KM orientation that incorporates knowledge creation, dissemination, and transfer may be too ambitious for one organisational function to master alone. They point out KM people should work closely with innovation groups on knowledge creation and with IT on knowledge dissemination. Since users of knowledge don’t want to go to a separate set of systems to find it, they feel knowledge should be combined with data and information in an integrated approach to content management.
For knowledge transfer and acquisition, the obvious internal partner for KM groups is the learning and training function, which is most frequently found in the Human Resources department. Davenport cites a survey he did of chief learning officers in 20 high-performing US companies. A majority of the learning executives reported their companies were already integrating knowledge and learning to a substantial degree, and focusing it on mission-critical job roles, rather than all company employees.
Not surprisingly, Davenport has several current knowledge-related projects underway. “I’m working with some other researchers in our Babson programme on some new approaches to collaboration, and on how companies learn from experimentation and research. I need to write up some research we’ve already done on social networks and their relationship to knowledge workspaces. We’ve also done a little bit of work on what might be called ‘idea management’ – how companies manage ideas from employees for improving some aspect of the business.”
But these are relatively small projects. What’s he thinking about that’s bigger? Davenport has a ready answer. “Decisions,” he says. What about them in particular? “I am convinced that companies need to begin systematically examining how they make decisions.There are all these new tools and approaches that organisations have to improve decision-making – KM, analytics, automated rules, ‘wisdom of crowds’, even intuition on occasion. But we don’t know whether all this knowledge and analysis is really being used to help make decisions. We’ve taken a totally supply-side approach to informing decisions, and now we need to address the demand side.”
That is a big and important topic. But Davenport has a record of successfully taking on big management issues, and of taking a substantial swipe at them before most others know they exist. It’s a good bet he will soon define new knowledge horizons yet again.