Buy with an exit strategy

One thing I always like to tell people when they are about to purchase eLearning products or services, is buy with an exit strategy. What this means is before you go spend your money or your company's money on a product or service, consider the impact of the product itself or the vendor of the product not being around at some point. It also means buy knowing that you may want to move in a different direction one day.

Some of the biggest mistakes I've seen in the market come from large purchases that do not have an exit strategy. A company pays millions for an LMS, want to switch but the cost of moving content from one LMS to the other is so expensive, that spending millions to renew a license for a product you don't like is actually the path of least resistance.

Now factor in that the money spent designing and developing content, at some point exceeds any money you spend on infrastructure, you would think that decisions around products and tools might be made with a little more caution. Straight up, no bullshit, but 99% of the products and services people purchase are designed with a hook. They are designed to make the exit strategy painful.

One of the greatest assets of using a structured authoring approach based on open source technology means that if I need to move my content and my technology to a new platform...I can. Because form and function aren't hard coded together and that both are built using standard web technologies, means that I can move content to a new delivery and authoring platform without having to reauthor everything. What are you going to do with your content when you switch LMS's? How much money are you going to shell out to move your 'legacy' content?

You might want to rethink your Articulate/Captivate/Lectora/etc strategy.