The lenses System Drift uses to read modern software ecosystems.

The share of an organization's daily workflows mediated by a single vendor, platform, or contract surface.

When concentration rises, day-to-day operations become structurally bound to a single provider's roadmap, pricing, and policy.

• Increasing share of seats or workflows under one license
• Bundled SKUs replacing category-by-category procurement
• Cross-product integrations only available within a single estate

High concentration narrows the realistic field of alternatives and shortens the timeline in which switching is feasible.

The realistic cost, time, and political capital required to exit a platform without degrading mission-critical operations.

Reversibility is the inverse of lock-in. Low reversibility means the organization has surrendered optionality without necessarily intending to.

• Data formats with no documented export path
• Workflows embedded in proprietary automation surfaces
• Identity and access centralized on a single provider

As reversibility falls, every future decision is increasingly shaped by the incumbent platform's constraints.

How integrations, data formats, and trained behaviors compound over time into a structural inability to switch.

Accumulation is rarely the result of a single decision. It is the cumulative residue of dozens of locally rational ones.

• Year-over-year growth in vendor-specific custom code
• Internal trainings centered on one product's UI
• New hires onboarded directly into the vendor's mental model

Accumulated dependency raises the cognitive and political cost of evaluating alternatives, even when they exist.

Gradual changes in vendor architecture, pricing, and policy that quietly reshape an organization's operating model.

Drift is invisible in any single quarter and unmistakable across years. It is how operating models change without explicit decisions.

• Repeated minor pricing revisions that compound
• SKU consolidation that bundles previously optional features
• Region or residency commitments adjusted under regulatory pressure

Drift shifts the cost-benefit of the platform without the organization formally re-deciding to use it.

The point at which an internal process is no longer separable from the platform it runs on.

Capture marks the moment that a workflow stops being an organizational asset and becomes a platform-defined behavior.

• Process documentation indistinguishable from product documentation
• Internal terminology mirrors a vendor's product vocabulary
• Removing the platform would also remove the process

Captured workflows cannot be migrated; they must be rebuilt. This is the hardest form of dependency to undo.