Use 7.  Understanding a generic sector

Rather than study individual organizations, there is often a requirement to look at a generic sector such as universities, hospitals, insurance companies, supermarkets, or charities.

The specific elements of each organization in an industry will be similar to each other but completely different to those in another industry. For instance, the skills of workers in car factories will be similar. However, they will be quite different to the skills required in teaching hospitals.

When looking at a particular sector, the individual elements must be understood  in the light of that sector - the type of risks, the categories of intellectual property, the skills of people, etc. The other issues concerning evaluation, strategy and exploitation will be less relevant since they will be more applicable to a particular organization. However, for specific sectors there are still trends in strategy, for instance, manufacturers outsourcing more of their assembly processes to suppliers and government departments using more contract staff.

If a number of similar organizations are to be studied, then analyzing a sector at the generic level first will produce a good set of questions and discussion topics and make it much easier and quicker to analyze the individual organizations later on.

As an example - if several different museums are going to be analyzed, looking at the generic level first, will save time later in formulating questions for individual cases.

The model can serve to produce a profile for a typical organization against which others can be compared. >>>