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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute“Core versus chore” is a sourcing test, not a synonym for important versus unimportant. A core capability creates differentiation, proprietary know-how, or strategic control. A chore is standardized work that a specialist, cloud provider, SaaS vendor, or managed-service partner may deliver more efficiently. The organization still owns the outcome, risk, security, resilience, and user experience.
That distinction comes from Christopher O’Malley’s opinion article, “IT Services: Core and chore, part 1,” published by Computerworld on November 3, 2011. Its thesis remains useful, but today it must cover cloud concentration, SaaS sprawl, identity, data regulation, automation, and supplier ecosystems.
What the 2011 article argued
O’Malley, then identified as CEO of Nimsoft, argued that IT leaders should separate services that can create long-term competitive advantage from standardized services that can be obtained externally. He proposed four delivery routes: build internally, license or white-label a solution, use an external provider, or combine those models. The CIO’s job therefore shifts from operating every component to deciding how each business service should be delivered and governed.
The article’s enduring warning is that outsourcing does not transfer accountability. External providers perform work; the enterprise remains responsible for business results.
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Core and chore: precise definitions
Core
A capability is core when it materially supports differentiation, proprietary operating knowledge, a distinctive customer or employee experience, faster strategic execution, or control of a strategically important workflow, platform, or data set. Internal ownership is especially compelling when the organization can operate or improve that capability better than available providers.
Chore
A chore is standardized, widely available work that is not a meaningful differentiator and is expensive or slow to maintain internally. Scale, specialization, automation, or a mature supplier market may make external delivery preferable. “Chore” does not mean disposable: failures can still create regulatory, financial, security, or reputational damage.
Critical is not the same as core
Reliable web hosting illustrates the difference. A website may be essential to revenue, yet hosting may not differentiate the business if cloud providers can deliver it more effectively. Classify services on two separate dimensions:
| Question | What it measures |
|---|---|
| How damaging would failure be? | Criticality, recovery needs, and resilience requirements. |
| How differentiating is the capability? | Strategic advantage, proprietary knowledge, and control. |
- Critical and differentiating: retain strategic ownership and substantial internal capability.
- Critical but commoditized: cloud, SaaS, or managed delivery may work, but require strong resilience, security, and contingency controls.
- Noncritical but differentiating: invest when it supports future strategy or experience.
- Neither: standardize, automate, consolidate, or source externally.
The modern sourcing menu is not binary
Organizations can mix delivery models rather than choosing “in-house” or “outsourced” for an entire service.
| Model | Typical use | Retained internal responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| Internal engineering or operations | Proprietary products and workflows | Product outcome, architecture, security, reliability |
| Commercial software or open source | Common business and technical functions | Configuration, integration, lifecycle, data governance |
| SaaS | Standardized applications | Identity, access, data, process design, continuity |
| Public cloud or managed infrastructure | Elastic compute, storage, platforms, hosting | Workload design, security controls, recovery, cost governance |
| Co-managed or multisourced service | Specialist operations alongside internal teams | Service ownership, integration, escalation, supplier coordination |
A company might keep product ownership, architecture, identity, and service management inside while sourcing commodity infrastructure and specialized operations.
What normally stays inside
- Proprietary pricing, logistics, clinical, manufacturing, compliance, or customer logic.
- Digital products and experiences that distinguish the company.
- Enterprise architecture and integration decisions.
- Security, privacy, identity, data governance, and regulatory accountability.
- Service ownership, supplier performance, continuity, and exit planning.
A low-visibility back-office workflow can still be core if it encodes unique know-how. Conversely, a highly visible service can remain a commodity.
What is often suitable for external delivery
Standardized hosting, collaboration, routine endpoint support, common HR applications, monitoring, and other mature services are stronger candidates when requirements are clear, providers are interchangeable, and performance, security, compliance, portability, and recovery can be verified. “Cheaper” is not established merely by a subscription or labor rate: migration, integration, security reviews, data transfer, administration, fallback capacity, and exit costs belong in total cost.
The hidden core: service integration and governance
O’Malley’s most important paradox is that the service can be a chore while managing the service ecosystem is core. Outsourcing creates more interfaces, dependencies, contracts, and failure paths; it does not remove the need for expertise.
Rank #3
- Define services, owners, offerings, commitments, and service levels.
- Map dependencies across internal systems, cloud, SaaS, and suppliers.
- Coordinate major incidents and changes across organizational boundaries.
- Measure business outcomes and user experience, not ticket volume alone.
- Maintain accurate asset and configuration data, with explicit data-quality ownership.
- Test portability, recovery, and provider exit before an outage or renewal crisis.
Modern platforms formalize this work. ServiceNow lists service catalog and request management, incident, asset, CMDB, virtual agent, workflow, major-incident, on-call, change, problem, analytics, and service-portfolio capabilities on its ITSM page. Its service-portfolio documentation connects services with offerings, commitments, subscriptions, catalogs, and SLAs. Jira Service Management models technical and business services, owners, dependencies, tiers, incidents, and stakeholders in its service definition and management guidance. Tools support governance; they do not decide what is core.
A practical scoring framework
Score each candidate service before selecting a delivery model. Use a documented scale such as 1 (low) to 5 (high), then require written evidence for every score.
- Strategic value: Does it differentiate customers or employees, contain proprietary knowledge, or accelerate strategy?
- Criticality: What are the impact, recovery-time, recovery-point, and availability requirements?
- Market maturity: Are providers numerous, standardized, geographically suitable, and demonstrably secure?
- Economics: Include total cost, staffing difficulty, consumption variability, transition, minimum commitments, switching, and fallback costs.
- Risk and control: Assess data sensitivity, regulation, cyber exposure, concentration, geography, auditability, and migration ability.
- Performance and experience: Test latency, support response, observability, service-level commitments, and actual user outcomes.
- Ownership: Name the internal owners for outcome, architecture, security, vendor performance, incident escalation, changes, data quality, continuity, and exit.
Retain or tightly control a capability when it is proprietary, rapidly changing, poorly served by the market, or impossible to exit safely. Source it when it is standardized, replaceable, and contractually and technically verifiable.
Modern edge cases
Critical commodity
Identity, DNS, payment gateways, and cloud platforms may not differentiate the product, but their failure can stop operations. Treat them as non-core services with strategic governance, resilience testing, concentration controls, and tested alternatives.
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Categories can change
A commodity can become core when it becomes a key data source, enables a new business model, becomes a customer-experience differentiator, or acquires regulatory importance. Reassess classifications as strategy and dependencies change.
Multisourcing
Several suppliers can reduce concentration risk while increasing integration effort, ownership ambiguity, incident-coordination difficulty, and data inconsistency. A named integrator and common operating processes are essential.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Common mistakes
- Classifying by technical difficulty instead of strategic value.
- Keeping every critical service internal, even when it is a commodity.
- Assuming outsourced work is no longer the enterprise’s problem.
- Ignoring upstream and downstream dependencies.
- Accepting supplier SLAs that do not represent business impact.
- Letting every vendor impose a separate tool and process.
- Failing to assign a named service owner.
- Treating CMDB or service-map data as accurate without governance.
- Over-customizing SaaS until its standardization benefit disappears.
- Skipping portability tests and exit plans.
Choosing governance tooling
Choose a platform for the operating model, not for feature count. ServiceNow is custom-quote enterprise software suited to complex, integrated estates; its breadth does not guarantee outcomes. Jira Service Management offers service ownership, dependencies, and close alignment with Atlassian development tools; its service-management functionality is on Standard, Premium, and Enterprise plans rather than Free, with current pricing to be checked on Atlassian’s official site.
Freshservice supports service desks, assets, operations, business-team workspaces, automation, reporting, and integrations. Its retrieved Business Teams page listed Pro at $49 per user/month billed annually or $59 billed monthly; that is a Business Teams signal, not a price for every Freshservice ITSM plan, and that product omits some IT-specific capabilities such as infrastructure monitoring and technical change management. See the official page.
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ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus offers cloud and on-premises editions. Its retrieved pricing page showed on-premises starting signals of $13 per technician/month for Standard, $27 for Professional, and $67 for Enterprise, subject to geography, billing term, edition, and current availability. Compare implementation, administration, integrations, and asset counts through the official pricing page, not just the headline rate.
Evaluate any platform on service and business-capability modeling, dependency mapping, incident/change/problem workflows, data quality, supplier management, integrations, outcome reporting, automation governance, security and residency, and migration or exit capability.
How the thesis holds up
The 2011 language is historical, not a universal standard, but its central test survives: invest scarce internal talent where technology creates advantage; obtain standardized execution where the market is stronger; and retain control of outcomes, risk, architecture, and integration. Cloud, SaaS, managed services, and automation make the distinction more useful—not less—because they expand the number of suppliers and the need for disciplined service ownership.
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