About Core and Context

We understand many executives or principals don’t want to talk about IT, much less worry about IT. We work to align our services with sound business strategy for our clients. Business is fundamentally about scarcity and abundance. A business wins by carefully managing the things that are scarce and squandering the abundant. In most organizations the greatest scarcity is the time, talent and attention of the key staff.

This scarcity, the time of a firm's talent, is very often the key to success in achieving a competitive advantage. This scarce resource needs to be applied exclusively to innovation in and management of those activities that differentiate your enterprise from the myriad of others in the market, that put your firm in front of more people with whom you wish to transact. Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, named these activities core.

All businesses have lots of other activities, sometimes mission critical, that need to be fulfilled with the absolute minimum of the scarce time and attention of the key staff. Moore calls these activities context. Today, the portion of IT that supports business functions (as opposed to engineering IT in technology firms) is context in almost every enterprise. Of course, it’s important, it’s even mission critical. It’s how you create and capture new ideas, keep vital records, plan and analyze threats and opportunities, communicate and collaborate with teammates, partners, clients and others.

BUT important doesn’t make IT a source of differentiation or a good place for innovation. Your core staff members innovate all the time –it’s a natural human action. The best strategy is to make sure they innovate where it matters and is coherent with your firm’s mission. Having a unique backup system or home-grown CRM is unlikely to differentiate you. Non-standard systems cost more, are less reliable and force key people to think more about IT and less about what’s core to your organization.

The most successful organizations focus on managing their core and get specialists, often outside the organization, to handle the context. In the case of IT, that would be us--Far Above Average, Trusted IT Infrastructure Management. We promise robust, stable information infrastructure, designed to align with and enable the goals and objectives of your business.

Why does IT need management?

Why can’t I just hire a good IT person?

How do I know if our present service provider is doing a good job?

IT isn’t rocket science. All my folks are sophisticated and support themselves.

That’s all well and good but we can’t afford that kind of support.

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