How AI Is Helping Companies Redesign Processes

by Thomas H. Davenport, Matthias Holweg and Dan Jeavons

March 2, 2023

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Summary.

In the 1990s, business process reengineering was all the rage: Companies used budding technologies such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the internet to enact radical changes to broad, end-to-end business processes. Buoyed by reengineering’s academic and consulting proponents, companies anticipated transformative changes to broad processes like order-to-cash and conception to commercialization of new products.

Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology at Babson College, the Bodily Bicentennial Professor of Analytics at UVA’s Darden School of Business, a visiting scholar at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and a senior adviser to Deloitte’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer Program.

Matthias Holweg is the American Standard Companies Professor of Operations Management and director of the Oxford Artificial Intelligence Program at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

Dan Jeavons is the Vice President for Computational Science and Digital Innovation at Shell. He has played a key role in scaling digital and data science technology across Shell’s businesses, and has led the multi award-winning Data Science Centre of Excellence since its inception in 2013. He is based in Bangalore.

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How AI Is Helping Companies Redesign Processes

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