When vendor lock-in is worth the effort

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Vendor lock-in is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

When it is worth it

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.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How to decide

Proprietary formats are the expensive kind of convenient. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

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
• 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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.