Open Data Group provides consulting services, outsourced analytical services, analytic staffing, and expert witnesses broadly related to data and analytics. It has experience with customer data, supplier data, financial and trading data, and data from internal business processes.

It has staff in Chicago and San Francisco and clients throughout the U.S.

Open Data Group began operations in 2002. Information about its principals can be found here. Open Data Group consists of Open Data Partners LLC, which serves commercial clients, Open Data Research LLC, which serves the public sector, and Open Data Technologies LLC, which develops and deploys proprietary trading models.

Open Data's consulting philosophy is nicely summed up by Marvin Bower, one of McKinsey & Company's founders. Bower led his firm using three rules: (1) put the interests of the client ahead of revenues; (2) tell the truth and don't be afraid to challenge a client's opinion; and (3) only agree to perform work that is necessary and something [you] can do well. You can find more information about Marvin Bower and his business philosophy in this biography.

Open Data's outsourced services employs open source software whenever it can for two important reasons: First, some of the highest quality software is open source. Second, by using open source software for its outsourced services, Open Data provides better value for its clients. Open Data also develops open source software for data mining and analytics, which it uses for the majority of its projects. For example, a typical Open Data outsourced data service is built over Linux, MySQL, PHP, Python, and R.

In addition, Open Data incorporates open source software and methodologies developed by the National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Data Mining Group for particular specialized solutions.

Open Data is located in River Forest, Illinois, which is about 10 miles west of downtown Chicago. Directions can be found here.