Right-Sourcing Content Competency

As Geoffrey Moore points out in his excellent new book, Dealing With Darwin, competing successfully in the global economy requires companies to regularly take a hard look at their businesses and figure out which parts of the operation are core competencies driving competitive advantage and what other parts are “context” – i.e. those functions that support the business but are not necessarily unique or proprietary. The rapidly changing electronic information industry contains many examples of companies where technology has made ubiquitous many processes where only large aggregators used to be competent. Examples of this revolutionary change over the last ten years, where readily available technologies have replaced formerly proprietary “core” capabilities, include print-to-digital conversion, data enrichment, text mining and data dissemination.

Publishers and other companies in content-intensive businesses like business intelligence, media analysis, and the myriad of new web-based end-user applications would do well to follow Moore’s advice and regularly review which technology and infrastructure investments are core sources of sustainable competitive advantage, and which are merely “context”. His key recommendation is that “context” functions (in this example perhaps print-to-digital data conversion or content acquisition via web-scraping) are those that might be outsourced at lower cost, without threatening competitive advantage.

This is obviously the rationale for the growing business process outsourcing movement, which has moved so many US companies to move basic operational functions to lower-cost providers in Asia. However, this is also a strategy to consider for fulfilling other functions where highly specialized knowledge or technical capabilities may be required that are still not necessarily “core” to the growth of a business. Some of these functions may include sales, marketing, finance, process design, licensing, IT and training. Enter a new type of company, made up of specialists with significant domain experience, who can offer a way to “right-source” those functions and permit their clients to invest in their core capabilities. One example is a new business, Unlimited Priorities, started by Iris Hanney, formerly President of Information Publishing Group, a division of Techbooks. Iris has assembled a team of veterans of the online information industry. The company will focus primarily on those evolving small and mid-size firms in need of senior managerial support and direction at all levels. A key difference between Unlimited Priorities and other consultancies that serve this market is that these specialists will do more than just advise – they will actually come in and do what is required to move the client company to the next step in its growth. This fills a significant gap in the market, and provides a solution where emerging businesses achieve the necessary focus that will allow them to bring their core innovations to market.