Is a tool list a competitive advantage?
Posted by Tate Hansen Tue, 10 Oct 2006 02:53:00 GMT
We use lots and lots of open source tools, commercial tools, and some home grown tools to do assessments. We have priorities, flowcharts to guide which tools work under which conditions and ways we like to organize and analyze results.
Is this knowledge IP (Intellectual Property)? What are the pros and cons of being fully transparent? Most, if not all, of the information is already out there -- it is just not neatly packaged.
I tend to want to be more transparent, but I’ve recently noticed several partners asking for explicit details on our processes. They want to see the tool list and learn the “details”.
None of what we do is secret, but at the same time I feel hesitant to divulge everything freely. What is your opinion?