What do you do?

Over the past few months I’ve been conducting some research into the use of new digital channels amongst organisations in the UK on behalf of The IG Group. I’m currently going through the analysis of dozens of interviews carried out as part of that process (the full report will be available in the Autumn).

As part of the interviews, I asked what I thought would be a fairly straightforward question – in which industry sector does your organisation operate?

I’ve been amazed at how many times that seemingly simple query resulted in a long answer, often starting with something along the lines of “Ooh, now there’s a question…”

This is an interesting reflection of how complex organisations have become. Wholesalers become retailers, service providers start to become product companies. Established truths become blurred.

Right at the start of my career I worked on the implementation of a big customer database at one of the major accounting and professional services firms. Assigning Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes to each company was part of the task. One code per client. It was challenging back in the early 1990s. I wonder if that would be at all possible these days…