Most municipal vendor relationships do not fail because of bad technology. They fail because of misaligned expectations — about scope, about ownership, about what happens after the contract ends. The RFP process is designed to surface capabilities, but it rarely surfaces the questions that actually determine whether a partnership will succeed.
Before you sign your next digital services contract, here are five questions worth asking. They are not adversarial — any vendor worth working with will welcome them.
1. Who owns the code when the contract ends?
This is the single most important question in any digital vendor relationship, and it is the one most frequently glossed over. If a vendor builds a custom solution for your municipality, you need to know — in writing — who owns the intellectual property when the engagement concludes.
Some vendors retain ownership of all code they produce, licensing it back to you for the duration of the contract. When the contract ends, you lose access to your own system. Others build on proprietary frameworks that make migration technically difficult even when you legally own the code. The answer you want is clear and unambiguous: the municipality owns all custom code, all data, and all configurations produced during the engagement, with full rights to modify, extend, or migrate them independently.
2. What does your solution look like at year three?
Every vendor demo looks great on day one. The real question is what the system looks like after three years of use, updates, and evolving requirements. Ask to see a reference client who has been on the platform for at least two years. Talk to their IT team, not just the project sponsor. Ask about upgrade experiences, breaking changes, and unplanned costs.
Pay particular attention to how the vendor handles version upgrades. Do upgrades preserve your customizations, or do they require a reimplementation? Are there additional costs for major version changes? A solution that is affordable in year one but requires a costly migration in year three is not actually affordable.
3. Where does our data live, and can we get it back?
For Canadian public sector organizations, this is not optional — it is a legal requirement. Under FIPPA and equivalent provincial legislation, personal information collected by public bodies must be stored in Canada unless specific conditions are met. Ask your vendor explicitly: where are the servers? Which cloud provider? Which region? Are there any circumstances under which data might be replicated or backed up outside of Canada?
Equally important is data portability. If the relationship ends, can you export all of your data in standard, open formats? Or is it locked in a proprietary schema that effectively prevents you from leaving? The answer to this question tells you everything about how the vendor views the relationship — as a partnership or as a dependency.
4. What happens when we need something your product does not do?
No platform does everything. The question is what happens when you hit the edge of what the product was designed for. Some vendors have robust APIs and extension frameworks that allow you or a third party to build custom functionality. Others require you to submit a feature request and wait for a future release that may or may not address your specific needs.
Ask about the vendor's API coverage, their documentation, and whether you have the ability to integrate with other systems independently. A platform that traps you inside its own ecosystem is a platform that will eventually hold you back. The best solutions are ones that play well with the rest of your technology stack and give you the freedom to extend functionality as your community's needs evolve.
5. Who is our actual point of contact after go-live?
The sales process introduces you to the company's best people. The implementation phase gives you a dedicated project manager. And then go-live happens, and suddenly you are submitting tickets to a support queue staffed by people who have never seen your environment. This is one of the most common complaints in municipal technology procurement.
Ask specifically: who supports us after launch? What are the response time guarantees? Is there a named account manager, or are we in a general support pool? What does escalation look like? The answers will tell you whether the vendor is set up for long-term relationships or whether their business model depends on moving on to the next sale as quickly as possible.
The real question behind all of these
Each of these five questions is really asking the same underlying thing: is this vendor building a relationship or a dependency? The best technology partnerships leave you stronger and more capable, not more locked in. They give you ownership, flexibility, and the ability to make independent decisions about your own digital future.
Your community deserves a digital partner who wants you to stay because the relationship works — not because leaving is too expensive or too complicated.
Want to talk about this for your municipality?
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