40 years in custom software development taught me this the hard way, watching clients discover it too late.
Most businesses don’t think about data ownership until they want to leave a platform.
That’s when they find out their customer history, transaction records, operational data — the institutional memory of their entire business — is locked inside someone else’s system. Getting it out costs a fortune, if it’s possible at all.
When you build your own system, your data is yours. Full stop. You can query it, move it, analyze it, or take it somewhere else without asking permission or writing a check to a vendor.
After 40 years of watching clients deal with the cost and hassle of getting *their* data out of an enterprise platform, I’ve come to believe that owning your own data is a critical strategic decision. What decision are you making?
*Illustration by Christine Daniloff