Is vendor lock-in just an excuse for not wanting to innovate and take risks?
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Not an excuse for innovation. The thing is: your current vendor offers a new, innovative product?, other vendors offer innovative and MORE RELIABLE/CONVENIENT product worth the try?
I would argue that one of the biggest parts of the problem is that few in the technology space and even fewer in the infrastructure space are incented at all, by making change. They're incented by enabling new applications and by resiliency and availability of applications. And I'm talking about enterprises in general. People will say "That's not in my job description. I'm not paid to take a risk." And unfortunately, there are few true measures in IT for identifying the value of risk. And so, for most people, making change and getting out of lock-in is as much about avoiding making change, and potentially causing themselves risk in the job place, as it is about protecting the status quo. I wonder how many times people avoided making a decision because they thought it was hard, but without having any real mechanism to effectively measure IT against change and actively measure against risk. There are very few companies in the world that have really good programs for actually measuring their rate of change, and their reason for change, against actual risk.
I don't know if every business is responsive to immediate massive change. The fact is, people want incrementalism, people need to adjust to the change.
They won't take the disruption that comes with it. They think that there's a magic pill or a magic being that auto-magically will fix the problem. You can come in and go behind closed doors and fix some things and then come back and auto-magically things work again. Never actually works that way.
Vendor lock-in is a sales tool. Sellers can use it to frighten a prospect by saying, "Ooh, you're going to have vendor lock-in. Be careful." And in my experience with clients, they are loath to leave something, even when they don't like it, because it's the risk of leaving the thing. It doesn't matter if it's open, or portable, or whatever, it's just that the risks of change are high. And so, are they locked into a vendor or are they locked into risk?
Lock-in comes from so many perspectives: cultural, legal, cost, risk, organizational, priorities. All of those are factors that help decide what choices we make through the path.
There is a culture that ends up being created in organizations that tends to be entirely risk averse and that becomes the driver of all decisions, rather than right or wrong, or saving money or wasting money.
In part. I think a big reason why many people like to go with long-term contracts where they are locked into a vendor, is due to the RFP policies in their firms, which makes vendor selection a massive pain.
The process is so onerous and burdensome, they’d rather have a set it and forget it approach, even if the vendor is not fully meeting their needs.