Five mistakes teams make with vendor lock-in

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit vendor lock-in.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Ask how you would leave before you sign
• Data export should be tested, not assumed
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Turning this into a decision

In practice

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Three things worth confirming about vendor lock-in before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Ask how you would leave before you sign — 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.