Open Sourcing the Business Model

IT and Tech have started playing with open cards, exposing their handiwork and knowhow. What will happen if Business open up their inner secrets? Will the company still stay competitive? Will openness attract customers and open new prospects?

How business processes are perceived

Contracts are often signed on golf courses, between school buddies, hidden in safes, and are seldom reviewed.

What's to change

Seldom does a company expose all their price plans, annual sales, quantitative-, premium customer- or early-bird discounts.
Who are their customers? What did they buy? What discounts did they get? Who's the customers respective contacts? What does the contract say, in a format which is easily understandable and comparable.

Transparent contracts

If this contracts were readably available, it would be easier to:

• tech new employees to work in the sales department


• get an overview of the running contracts


• compare contracts profitability


• adjust the rest of the organization to suit the requirements of the contracts


• do an external revision

Having a formalized, standardized and simple way of describing contracts, stored in an accessible repository could make a whole lot of difference.

Opening the company

Making the Business Model, and in effect the company, more open would probably minimize the internal barriers between departments. Opening up can improve the felt transparency for the customer, making them more certain that they've done a choice based on facts and being able to compare them.
The opposite of an open company, is an used car dealership.

What's to loose

What is your company's focus? What are they good at? What is their special sauce that makes them different from the crowd?
Most likely, it's not the elegant blue suits, fancy partner events and golf outings.
If the product is so great, a company should be proud of it's customers and sales, and should be able to proudly flaunt them on the company intra-web and Internet.

What's next

Show your customers, contracts and pricing strategies to the world, and be proud of them. A standardized, simple format can increase accessibility and usefulness. If your Business Model isn't open and transparent; your customers will get their own impression of your company from elsewhere.