Has Your Vendor been Holding Your Data Hostage?

Posted by Kelley LearcloseAuthor: Kelley Lear Name: Kelley Lear
Email: kelley.lear@redmoonsolutions.com
Site: http://blog.redmoonsolutions.com
About: Kelley is a member of the executive leadership team and leads our sales and marketing efforts at Red Moon Solutions. Kelley’s extensive experience in project management, product management, and consulting with Fortune 500 and Global 1000 clients is extremely important in this role.See Authors Posts (127) on Dec 15, 2010 | 0 comments

First starting out in my career, most of the ERP solutions and other compliance software out there consisted of proprietary software and proprietary databases. It was common practice that once corporations were implemented…they were with you for a long time. Like it or not. One of the big issues was the sheer matter of exporting your data from one system and converting it to another. This was typically a costly, time consuming and painful exercise, if it could be done at all. The technology at that time was part of the issue, however the other major issue was the mind-set of the providers at that time. Many believed that you should make it is painful as possible for a client to leave you. I remember arguing with leadership even within my own company back in the day that we if our clients were not satisfied or if we were not meeting the needs of our clients with a particular solution that we should help them get their data out and make sure they have a smooth transition to a new provider. My argument was that if we were not able to make a client happy, why should we also kick them in the behind when they went out the door?

My “whine” for this Wednesday is that there are still companies that believe in holding their customers hostage and keeping their data ransom today! We have been working with a lot of clients recently, looking to implement our fixed assets management system. When we go to work with them on the data conversion and implementation, they are struggling internally with having to export data out manually, company by company or by small data sets at a time, in separate files. Many can only use a remedial report feature and can’t get large entities out at one time. Some don’t even know the toolset or have access to the toolsets provided to get the data out of their own system. One even told me that they were quoted a small fortune to get their data exported out of their current system. Good grief.

One thing to consider my friends, when you enter into a software contract, software as a service or hosting agreement, make sure that you have an exit strategy. Even if the software is still utilizing a proprietary database, find out if it is able to easily export all your groups and legal entity data into one file or a small amount of files. Can it export the data into Excel or .csv file format? Most alternative systems can easily deal with a flat file format. Think smart and think ahead. Hopefully, your vendor will provide you with a solution that you will be ecstatic with for many years to come. But, if for some reason you are not, you definitely don’t want your hands tied behind your back…