One of the biggest worries clients often have with companies like ours is tie in. There can be many reasons for changing software provider. Maybe a better system comes along. Maybe the business changes. Maybe you just don’t think your provider is keeping up with your business.
Well, the first thing, as a software provider, is to make sure our clients don’t want to leave us, by building systems that grow with our clients. This is why we have clients who’ve been with us for up to 18 years! But still, our view is that if you want to leave, you should be able to.
This has become topical for us recently with a new client. We are putting in place a customised business management system, which will replace and improve on the system they already have. An important part of this will involve migrating almost all of the data from their old system. Unfortunately, the old system not only doesn’t have decent data export facilities, but the supplier is wanting to charge the client a huge amount of money to export this data, and then take weeks to do it. This is the client’s data, let’s remember.
We’re at a bit of an impasse now and are even looking at legal channels. But here’s the point: an ethical software company will make it easy for clients to leave. We do this in two ways. For a start, we don’t tie people into long contracts. If you want to leave, give us 30 days notice. Secondly, if you did decide to leave, you’ll get a complete dump of your database (which any competent developer would be able to access), and a zip file of all your PDFs, photos and other attachments. And we’ll talk your new develop through how the data is structured. There is no charge for this.
‘Data portability’ is a legal obligation for personal data under GDPR, but the situation is a bit less clear for a company’s data. But legals notwithstanding, I have got quite angry with this incumbent supplier as I feel this sort of behaviour is holding their client to ransom and gives the industry a bad reputation.
It’s your data. Make sure you can get it back!