Vendor lock-in: the questions we get asked most

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. The questions about vendor lock-in that come up most often on our calls.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Do we need to care about this?

Ask how you would leave before you sign. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

How do we know it is working?

Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

How to tell if yours is fine

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.