Taxonomy (3)

At the industry level we are specifying simply which industry we are investigating. In our case this is the mobile technologies industry, but it could as well be the automotive, insurance, or healthcare industry. Thenext level covers industry segments. Here, we are getting somewhat specific to the industry our analysis applies to. For example, some of the segments within the mobile technologies industry we will describe include userdevices, content, or technology enablers. Within segments we find categories. Within the user devices segment, for example, are the portables and peripherals categories. Peeling the next layer of the onion, we encounter groups. Examples of two groups within the portables category are cell phones and PDAs. Within the PDA group, we are looking at various types, such as Pocket PC or Palm OS–powered PDAs. Lastly, we move to the final layer, our familiar constituencies. To close the loop, within the PocketPC type of PDAs there are firms, which offer the hardware a customer is considering to purchase, competitors that provide similar products, and so forth. Examples of firms offering the hardware include Compaq, among others. The complete path can be expressed as follows: Industry: Wireless Technologies/Segment: User Devices/Category: Portables/Group: PDAs/Type: Pocket PC/Constituency: Firm: HP.

As a final note about the new taxonomy, the mobile/wireless industry landscape we are presenting here uses industry-specific terminologywithin the generic taxonomy presented in Figure 6.1. For example, we
shortly will be talking about “content aggregators” and “network operators” as some of the categories of entities we will describe. Although this type of industry jargon makes sense for our analysis of the wireless web, it would obviously not apply were we to talk about the automotive industry, for example.

Taken From : Enterprise Guide to Gaining Business Value from Mobile Technologies