What is a Line of Business (LOB)?

Surprise, I don't fucking know.

A line of business is a corporate subdivision focused on a single product or family of products. That’s what Gartner says. But that can’t be right. That’s not how my company uses it. Or do they and I just don’t know what the fuck they are talking about?

What the fuck is a corporate subdivision? What is a non-corporate subdivision? Can an unincorporated business have a Line of Business?

Well, I had to have a ten minute conversation with ChatGPT but it was more fruitful than the five minute Google search, which just showed me a bunch of shit about Real Estate.

We came to the conclusion that people just use subdivision willy fucking nilly, without regard to whether there was ever a division to begin with. A "Line of Business” I guess can always be argued to be a subdivision, since you would need some kind of department within the organization to contain the LOB.

So we’ll cede that fucking point. But we’re still not past the point that my company chooses to call something a Line of Business and I have no idea what they are talking about. So in a holding company, one of your acquisitions, you talk to them and set up some accounts for them and now they are a LOB.

I think Gartner just has to have a bad definition, right? Line of Business, I don’t even know, sounds like a terrible fucking term. Like what line of work are you in? The line that business flows through. LOB, people say. Sounds smart. Follow up with the LOB by EOD.

Jesus I’m going to have to get some better sources than Googling. SEO and AI have fucked up Google Search as far as I can tell from the last hour of trying to learn something from this shit. An article starts off sounding like it’s going to make sense and then veers in a direction where you’re thinking to yourself, am I fucking crazy or is this a Frankenstein ass hodge podge of LLM’s bad dreams?

For example, check out this article:

https://www.digital-adoption.com/line-of-business/

Seems good and then we get to ‘How do different deparments use a line of business” and it has a chart comparing IT to LOB, but seems to be showing the negatives of LOB vs. IT, without any context that I can see. Granted I’m a fucking idiot and I spent two minutes looking at it, so I might just be a fucking idiot. You tell me.

Vocabulary.com, that sounds legit, they say ‘a particular kind of commercial enterprise’ is a LOB. So the fucking bodega on the corner is a LOB. Fucking lemonade stand you crossed the street to avoid? LOB. Jesus. Why not?

English.stackexchange.com actually has something helpful. Reddit like sites are the only truth any more. Everything else is SEO’d. Fucking democracy mannnn making a comeback. Or not, because I don’t fucking know how Reddit works.

“Here, the partner company has different departments such as financial, IT, HR, etc. These are more or less departments within the company by they generate revenue as well. That is why they are called LoB.”

I don’t even think this post is about the sentence itself, and the sentence doesn’t even make sense because the finance, IT and HR departments are operations, generally speaking, which means they are the downstairs people of Downton Abbey, meaning they don’t get raises and bonuses and shit because they actually don’t generate revenue, what some people call ‘cost centers’ as opposed to ‘profit centers’.

But if you replace those departments with like, I don’t know, fucking Soapsellers department, that could be a LoB (which is more elegant than LOB), because it’s a department and it generates revenue.

So basically once again, a generic ass term that doesn’t mean jack shit but allows you to sound like you should get a bonus and be working in a ‘profit center’ or even, if you’re really fucking lucky, a ‘Line of Business’.