The renewal notice arrived sixty days before expiry, as the contract required. It went to a shared mailbox, was read by somebody who assumed the service was still needed, and was approved on the grounds that it had been approved last year. The cost had risen nineteen percent. We were paying for four hundred and fifty licences and using a hundred and ten. And the agreement had quietly acquired, in a schedule appended two renewals earlier, a clause that made the price of leaving considerably higher than the price of staying.
That happened three times in our estate before anyone treated it as a pattern rather than three pieces of bad luck. And it is not really a procurement failure. It is a failure of ownership. The renewal arrives as an administrative task with a deadline, and the only way to challenge it is to do actual work: find out who uses the thing, what it is load-bearing for, whether the cheaper tier would do, what migrating away would cost. That work takes a week of somebody's attention, and that somebody is always already busy with something that has a sponsor. Approving costs ten minutes. The path of least resistance is a standing order on the bank account.
What changed it for us was moving renewals out of procurement's calendar and into ours, ninety days ahead, as a scheduled engineering task with a named owner and a small required output. Actual usage against licensed quantity, pulled from the tool rather than estimated. Who would notice if this stopped on Friday. What the realistic alternative is and what switching would cost. One page.
We did not cancel very much. Two tools went, one dropped two tiers, and in three cases the exercise produced genuine negotiating leverage simply because we walked in knowing our own usage numbers before the vendor told us theirs. The aggregate saving across the first year paid for considerably more than the time it took.
The part worth generalising: a recurring cost with no recurring review is not a decision anymore, it is a habit. And habits in IT spending compound quietly for years, because nobody ever has to justify continuing to do what the organisation is already doing.
– Serguey Shinder
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