A short guide to vendor lock-in

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Everything we would tell a client about vendor lock-in in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The reason this keeps coming up

Ask how you would leave before you sign. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

How we handle it

Data export should be tested, not assumed. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The mistakes we see most

Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.