The real cost of ignoring vendor lock-in

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Nobody bills you for neglecting vendor lock-in. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• Ask how you would leave before you sign
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

Data export should be tested, not assumed. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What to do next

Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

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
• Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient — 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.