Avoid lock-in

Lock-in is when leaving a supplier is painful enough that you effectively can't, so they hold the power at every renewal. It rarely arrives as one big decision. It builds up over time, in a few ordinary ways:

• They own the work.

  The supplier owns the code, so you cannot hand it to anyone else or maintain it yourself. Every change runs through them, at their price.

• They hold the data.

  Your data sits in a format only their software reads, so moving it out means a slow, risky conversion you keep putting off.

• No one else knows it.

  The thing was built just for you, so no other supplier knows it. Re-tendering means paying someone new to learn or rebuild it, and the current supplier wins by default.

• The knowledge is theirs.

  Only the supplier's people understand how it works. They walk, you are blind. This one needs no contract clause at all.

No single term keeps you free. Staying able to leave is a set of habits, each one shutting a different door:

• Own the intellectual property.

  Then you can hand it to another supplier or maintain it yourself. Go further than owning it on paper: make the supplier keep the code in a repository your department controls from day one. Code you hold and can read is code no supplier can sit on.

• Use open standards and open formats.

  So your data and your service stay portable, and more than one supplier can work on them.

• Avoid bespoke where something off-the-shelf will do.

  Standard things have a market of suppliers who know them. Bespoke things have a market of one.

• Keep contracts short.

  Short contracts bring the switching point around often, so being stuck cannot deepen without you noticing.

• Require off-boarding.

  Make the contract require the supplier to hand back your data in a usable, standard form and help you move, rather than holding it hostage. The UK builds this right into its buying: a supplier has to let you off-board to a competitor.

• Keep enough knowledge in-house.

  Even with every clause in place, you can only leave if someone on your side understands the service well enough to run the move.

Buying is only the start. Once the service is live, most cycles are about keeping the lights on: patching, watching, making careful small changes. You are not adding big new features. Your job in this stretch changes shape, but it does not stop.

You hold the supplier to what was agreed, and you watch for drift, the slow way a supplier's direction and your needs pull apart over renewals. And you keep half an eye on the exit you planned for at the start, because the day comes when a part of the service, or the supplier, or the whole thing reaches its end. Planning the exit early is what makes it calm when it arrives.