David M. Upton Fellow

David Upton is a fellow with Cutter Consortium's Business-IT Strategies, Sourcing & Vendor Relationships, and Business Technology Trends & Impacts practices. . He was elected to the prestigious American Standard Chair of Operations Management at Oxford University, where he also serves on the governing body of Christ Church College. Previously, he was on the faculty at Harvard Business School for 20 years, where he was the Albert J. Weatherhead III Professor of Business Administration. Mr. Upton’s research focuses on operations improvement, innovation, strategy, and IT and spans the globe from India to China and from the US to South America. More recently, his specific work centers on the rapid improvement of service and knowledge-based organizations. Mr. Upton is also a professional engineer, starting his career working on the floor of manufacturing plants. He spent his early research years working on artificial intelligence and the Internet during its initial development.

Mr. Upton is the recipient of Harvard’s Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching and is consistently rated best instructor in a wide range of operations and IT courses/presentations. He has led Harvard’s first-year MBA courses in technology and operations management and served as Faculty Chair of the executive course on operations strategy and improvement for 15 years. Mr. Upton also taught the Advanced Management Program for senior managers as well as China-based courses on IT and operations with Tsinghua University (Beijing). More recently, he led Harvard’s course for CEOs in the Young Presidents’ Organization.

Mr. Upton has been Director of Tech Data, a Fortune 100 IT distributor and service provider since 1997 with offices in both the UK and US. He is a widely sought consultant for TV and news organizations and was the subject of the TV special Profiles on Leaders in Information Technology for his work on new approaches to the rapid innovation of operations and IT. Mr. Upton has consulted for a wide range of organizations, including Unilever, Wells Fargo Bank, AT&T, DTE Energy, General Electric, ITC (India), and Saint-Gobain (France). He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Pursuing the Operations Edge and Radically Simple IT. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.