What Do You Do When A Vendor Changes Their Terms of Service?

What Do You Do When A Vendor Changes Their Terms of Service?

I’ll ask the question, what do you do when one of your vendors changes their terms of service? What happens when things become more restrictive than what they used to be? As an organization, do you simply change vendors or do your users have to change their behavior?

These days its all about the cloud, cloud this, cloud that, everything is in the cloud. But as a practical matter you still have to migrate from one vendor to another and that is not easy, especially the more users \ seats that have to be moved from one service to another. There are both internal, and if necessary external, resources that need to be queued up for the actual migration project and let’s not forget about downtime as you move from one service to another. Oh yeah, what if the users discover that they don’t like the new service as much as they liked the old one?

This last point feeds into user behavior. If you can’t \ won’t change vendors, can you change user behavior? That is not a technical question, that is an organizational \ management question that only they can answer. The vendor has changed their terms of service and your people cannot do the same things with the app \ service as they have in the past because the vendor is restricting more & more and their reason is, “protection of their customers.” How, as a technical manager in your organization do you convince managers & users alike that they cannot use the app \ service now like they used to use it in the past? One harsh but effective way is for the user’s account to get locked out for a certain period of time if that user violates the “updated” terms of service (this happens automatically through the vendor; you don’t have anything to do on your end). After a few lockouts managers start to realize that hey, we have to do thing differently now (I believe that is called an epiphany). Kathy Kountze put it best at the Interop19 technology conference, “Human nature does not gravitate to change."


- Rob Hiltbrand