No function is an advantage everywhere, and few are a necessity everywhere. The same profession can be what one company competes on and mere upkeep for the next.
At a software company, engineering is the product. At a consumer brand, the same engineering work is a necessity: the brand builds a good-enough store and stops. Design is the advantage for a fashion brand that competes on taste—taste increasingly sets brands apart—and a necessity for a B2B distributor that just needs a usable catalog. A scientist doing R&D at a pharma company is searching for the company’s original insight. The same scientist doing quality control is doing necessity work.
Geoffrey Moore made a version of this distinction with core (what differentiates you) and context (everything else). Nicholas Carr’s “IT Doesn’t Matter” argued that IT had become a cost of doing business, and critics pointed to Walmart, Amazon, and Google, where IT clearly was the advantage. Both sides were right, because it depended on whether IT was core for that company.
The split isn’t clean, either. A function that’s usually a necessity can briefly become decisive during a replatforming, a crisis, or a regulatory change, when regulation can create opportunity for whoever handles it best. And a function that’s an advantage overall has plenty of corners that are pure upkeep.
References
- Geoffrey Moore, Dealing with Darwin, 2005
- Nicholas Carr, “IT Doesn’t Matter” (opens in new tab), Harvard Business Review, 2003