1. June 2016
Business Starts Opening Up to Open Data
The drive to make data open—free to use, reuse, and redistribute—is not new, but it’s changing by finding new potential
business applications as data technology evolves. Companies are finding that making their data open enables complementary
businesses to develop around that information. That openness to other businesses can enhance companies’ own businesses
and increase overall transparency.
Recent growth in the power of data manipulation, visualization, and storage technologies continues to transform the whole
concept of open data, spurring business innovations from medical diagnostics1
to expanded job opportunities.2
The open-data
movement, a loosely affiliated group of public officials and academics whose early adoption of open principles and protocols for
scientific data gave the movement its start, now counts private-sector businesses among its supporters.
Major adopters of open data
Broadly speaking, the move toward the use of open data has split among three main groups, each of which is rapidly evolving
open data’s uses.
 Governments and public bodies continue opening up vast amounts of data. Public open-data sites such as data.gov.uk
(the open government data portal of the United Kingdom) and data.gov (the open government data portal of the United
States) now contain many thousands of data sets. Some address topics with huge applications to both public- and
private-sector audiences—such as supplier-level public-spending data—and some, like, say, data on tree species
distribution in national forests, have a more specialized appeal.
 Some companies now make selected data available to enhance their business performance, such as Nike’s sharing of
data to promote transparency in the company’s supply chain.3
 Companies have also begun sharing detailed transaction data to help customers make complex market comparisons and
manage their consumption. Some banks let customers download detailed transaction data so customers can analyze
their spending and make meaningful comparisons between how much their accounts cost versus the competition’s.
Direct and indirect benefits
Successful uses of open data expand business opportunities and improve customer engagement in new and innovative ways,
often by enabling complementary businesses and services to develop. For companies considering how to harness the power of

2. open data so they can boost performance, senior management should consider the following points.
 Open data offers companies with physical outlets significant opportunities to better understand their customer bases. In
the United Kingdom, for example, government open data, which would otherwise be inaccessible, enables retailers to
profile their customers in great detail. It can help answer such questions as, What types of jobs do customers do? Do
customers own their own houses? How much do customers earn? When combined with proprietary information such as
point-of-sale data, loyalty card data, and anonymized mobile phone data, open data can create market-shifting
opportunities for gaining valuable customer insights. And that could lead to a data-rich analysis that guides decisions
about which items to stock, what to promote, and what to charge, which can represent an advantage over competitors
that don’t have the same array of information to back their decisions.
 Offering selectively open data does more than project an image of corporate social responsibility. As companies compete
digitally, those that create ecosystems will likely generate the largest profits. Think of Amazon and the retail ecosystem it
created by opening much of its data to collaborative competition—a sort of “co-opetition”—that allows other sellers to
offer merchandise on Amazon sites.4
Opening data and platforms is part of the path to creating ecosystems. Nike started
publishing open data as a means of promoting its sustainability credentials and then developed a publicly available open-
data app based on its in-house index on the sustainability and environmental impact of materials used in its products to
be used by other designers.5
That approach is currently the least developed of the three types of open-data use, and it’s
understandable that senior management might worry that company data could be used by competitors or could cast the
company in a bad light. Those are indeed valid concerns, but the private sector continues to mirror government and
public organizations in increasing its use of open data. Transport for London, the publicly funded organization that runs
London’s underground trains and buses, admits it took a leap of faith in 2007 by making its real-time train, bus, and bike
data openly accessible to app developers.6
But the vast array of third-party apps and other services that that decision
spawned has transformed passengers’ experiences for the better while costing the organization very little. Estimates put
the annual value of time saved through these apps at $83.7 million.7
Other companies and organizations could launch
similar initiatives and realize similar benefits.
 The practice of giving customers access to financial and billing transaction data is well established—and expanding.
Many banks and telecom companies now allow customers to download their full, personal transaction data in a standard
format, such as Excel or .csv to see how they’re spending their money. In the United Kingdom, work is well under way to
standardize the banking data interface, which means customers will be able to access real-time transaction data from
many financial products—most likely by way of third-party-designed apps hosted on their personal devices. This
continues to offer greater insight into consumer behavior, which in turn enables those banks and telecoms to improve the
customer experience and possibly lower costs.8
Opportunities outweigh threats
Business leaders might first see the increasingly open nature of company data as a threat, but those who fail to adapt may be
missing potential opportunities. As consumer expectations grow beyond access to personal transaction data and the options
consumers have for its use, companies that don’t get on top of the open-data trend risk being outpaced by competitors. Even
though embracing open data in specific contexts may appear to sacrifice proprietary competitive advantage, we already know
that information is power, and companies that can harness vast amounts of data could emerge as genuine outperformers.

3. For comments or additional information, contact:
Drew Carter
Managing Director
dcarter@alixpartners.com
+1 (646) 469-6758
Mark Giles
Managing Director
mgiles@alixpartners.com
+44 20 7098 7594
David Branch
Director
dbranch@alixpartners.com
+44 7876 344 859
www.alixpartners.com Follow AlixPartners
1 Joel Gurin, “9 Healthcare Innovations Driven by Open Data,” InformationWeek, November 18, 2014, http://www.informationweek.com/government/open-
government/9-healthcare-innovations-driven-by-open-data/d/d-id/1317530.
2 Charlotte Jee, “14 innovative UK companies using open data 2016,” Techworld, January 19, 2016, http://www.techworld.com/picture-gallery/startups/12-
innovative-uk-companies-using-open-data-3613884/#4.
3 Lorna Thorpe, “Nike releases app for designers containing index of materials,” Guardian, May 15, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-
business/sustainability-case-studies-nike-making-app.
4 Paavo Ritala, Arash Golnam, and Alain Wegmann, “Coopetition-based business models: The case of Amazon.com,” Industrial Marketing Management, 43,
No. 2, (2014): 236–249. doi:10.1016/j.indmarman.2013.11.005.
5 Thorpe, “Nike releases app for designers.”
6 Becky Hogge, “Transport for London: Get Set, Go!” thegovlab.org, January 2016, accessed May 23, 2016, http://odimpact.org/static/files/case-studies-
transport-for-london.pdf.
7 “Opening Up Transport Data in London,” PTI, March 13, 2014, http://www.uitp.org/opening-transport-data-london.
8 Antony Peyton, “Open Banking Standard aims to share a banking revolution,” Banking Technology, February 16, 2016,
http://www.bankingtech.com/437692/open-banking-standard-aims-to-share-a-banking-revolution/.
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