How to get vendor lock-in right
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The short answer to vendor lock-in is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What it costs to ignore
Ask how you would leave before you sign. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Data export should be tested, not assumed
- Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
A reasonable first step
What this looks like day to day
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.