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Vesa Purho
Development Manager, Nokia
To answer that question, we need to define two things: core
competence and documentation.
In their book,
Exploring
Corporate Strategy (Prentice Hall,
1999), Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes offer some criteria
for defining a core competence. They define core
competencies as "those competencies which critically
underpin the organisation's competitive advantage." So, a
core competence is a competence that brings competitive
advantage; that is, it adds value to the product that the
customers are ready to pay for and it results in their
preferring your product over the competitor's.
Core competencies are not static but vary due to changes in
the competition. For example, at one time, the critical
success factor for car manufacturers was market access. To
access markets, the manufacturers' core competencies were
those that enabled them to establish and efficiently run
dealer networks and overseas production plants. These core
competencies added value until Japanese manufacturers
outperformed the others in quality and reliability. Then,
competencies that enabled the production of good quality,
reliable cars became critical success factors.
According to Johnson and Scholes, core competencies must
meet several challenging criteria. They must provide value
to the buyer and they must be difficult for a competitor to
imitate because if a competence is easy to imitate, it does
not provide competitive advantage. Therefore, they are rare
and complex because they are not explained by one factor but
by linked factors or they are so embedded in organisational
practice or knowledge that they are tacit. The core
competencies can relate, for example, to cost efficiency,
effectiveness (does the product as a whole match customer
expectations), or managing linkages within the
organisation's value chain (which provides leverage that is
"a measure of the improvement in performance achieved
through the management of linkages between separate
resources and activities").
Documentation can mean many things. To some people,
especially those not in the "documentation business,"
documentation represents producing the traditional paper
manuals or online help. They contend that as long as people
can write good English, or whatever language, they can
create good documents. In contrast, I prefer to think of
documentation as any information in any media that a user
receives from the manufacturer of a product.
So, is documentation a core competence? I think it can be.
However, I also argue that it depends largely on how the
documentation staff position themselves in the company. If
the documentation staff see themselves only as the
"writers," then the criteria for a core competence is not
fulfilled, because "anybody can write."
However, if the documentation staff see themselves as the
creators of better products, if they bring together
knowledge about the users, the product, communication
theories, and information design, if they enable the users
to perform their tasks efficiently, several criteria of a
core competence are fulfilled. The documentation is complex
because it requires knowledge in several areas. The
documentation is difficult to imitate because knowing the
users is difficult; although competitors can gain user
knowledge, they cannot combine that knowledge with knowledge
of your product as well as you can. Finally, the
documentation involves managing linkages between activities
and different resources (marketing, training, product
design). A strong and competent documentation staff enable
experts in product design and development to concentrate on
their tasks.
Naturally, there are cases in which documentation is not a
core competence. If the competition centers mostly around
price and price is what the customers value most, then
documentation certainly is not a core competence. The
cheaper it can be done, the better. When the customers value
their initial investment costs (CAPEX) more than their
continuous operating costs (OPEX), documentation may not be
a core competence of a company. However, when the situation
is the opposite (operating costs valued more highly than the
cost of an initial investment), documentation is a good
candidate to be a core competence. But first management must
perceive it as something other than just "writing
documents." Of course, there are times when we cannot
changes management's mind, no matter how hard we try.
This article is the personal opinion of the author and does
not necessarily reflect the opinion or practice of Nokia.
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