In episode 105 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Sarah O’Keefe talk about an exit strategy as part of your content operations planning.
“You need to be thinking about the what-ifs 5 or 10 years down the road while you’re picking the tool. Are we going to have flexibility with this tool? Is it going to be able to help us support things we may not even be thinking about or may not even exist right now?”
– Alan Pringle

Related posts: 

* Scriptorium’s Content Ops Manifesto
* Content operations (content ops)

Twitter handles:

* @alanpringle 
* @sarahokeefe

Transcript:
Alan Pringle:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about an exit strategy as part of your content operations planning. Hi, everyone. I’m Alan Pringle.
Sarah O’Keefe:                   And I’m Sarah O’Keefe.
AP:                   And today, Sarah and I are going to talk about something that probably doesn’t get enough attention, and that is an exit strategy for your content operations.
SO:                   Yeah, and it seems vaguely impolite to talk about the process of leaving a vendor when you’re planning and thinking about which tools to buy and which systems to build and how to build up your content operations. But I think it beats the alternative, which is not to think about leaving a vendor and then 5 or 10 years down the road, you have to exit and you are truly, truly in trouble.
AP:                   Yeah, and I can understand, I will admit, I have caught glimpses of side eye from client stakeholders more than once when exit strategies came up during content strategy assessments. We’re talking about getting out of a tool before it’s even selected, and I can kind of understand the thought process. Why are we talking about that now? Well, as you pointed out, you really need to talk about it during the planning phase. Otherwise, you’re going to be left with a lot of muck when something happens and you’re forced to leave a tool for some reason.
SO:                   Yeah. The side eye from the vendors is even better when we start asking awkward questions. But the alternative, we’ve got projects right now where we are looking at, how do we exit a particular component content management system, move a customer to a new system because it’s time, and they need to move for good and valid reasons. And what we’re running into is that because the inbound 5 or 10 or 15 years ago didn’t really take into account the inevitable exit, we have huge migration costs. We’ve got relicensing costs. We’ve got rebuilding, recustomization, reintegration. It’s almost as bad as the original project of going from unstructured to structured content. It is super expensive if you don’t have a good path to exit.
AP:                   Sure, and let’s kind of take two steps back. The bottom line here is that planning to get away while you’re choosing your tools is a risk mitigation strategy. It’s a way to keep things from completely blowing up 3, 5, 10 years down the road. So it’s a way to lower your risk. As part of that mitigation of risk, let’s talk about some of the odds and ends that you really need to be thinking about as a way to develop your exit strategy.
SO:                   You know,