Dealing with Vendor Lock-in

Vendor lock-in is the dependence of the customer to a certain extent on a supplier. It is a current topic in Dutch politics and particularly complex in public procurement of IT. In this paper a categorisation is developed to differentiate the underlying reasons for vendor lock-in. The categories are identified by conducting exploratory literature research. For each category a corrective approach is proposed to deal with a vendor lock-in situation. As an example, four cases of vendor lock-in situations at the IT purchasing department of the Dutch Tax and Customs administration (DTCA) are analysed and discussed. Purchasers can use the categorisation and corrective approaches proposed in this paper for evaluating and managing vendor lock-in.