A practical checklist for vendor lock-in

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Run through this the next time vendor lock-in comes up.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The checklist

• Ask how you would leave before you sign
• Data export should be tested, not assumed
• Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What is actually at stake

Ask how you would leave before you sign. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

How to tell if yours is fine

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about vendor lock-in before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Data export should be tested, not assumed — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.