There is a quiet decision buried in every software project that decides, years later, whether the client is free or trapped: the choice between a proprietary format that only your system understands, and an open standard that any system can. It rarely feels important on day one. It always turns out to be.
We think about this often because of a Learning Management System our team built for a UK client, on the cloud, around SCORM. Working to a standard rather than inventing our own format was a constraint at the time. In hindsight it was the point.
What a standard actually buys you
SCORM specifies how learning content is packaged, how it launches, and how it reports progress back to whatever platform hosts it. The value is portability: content built to the standard isn't married to one vendor's system — it can move. If the client ever wants to change platforms, their content and their records go with them. That is the opposite of lock-in, and lock-in is the thing serious clients have learned to fear.
The cloud part is about who can depend on it
Building for a UK client from Nepal meant the system had to be dependable without us standing next to it. That is what cloud architecture, done properly, gives you: availability, maintainability, and the ability for the client to rely on the system rather than on the builder's presence.
Ownership is a design choice, not a closing formality
The best signal that a vendor is building for the client's benefit rather than their own leverage is how the project ends. Open formats. Documented systems. Data the client can export in a form anyone can read. Source and knowledge that genuinely transfer. You can't retrofit that at handover — it has to be a decision made at the start and held to all the way through.
The principle, past e-learning
This isn't really about SCORM. It's a way of building. Whether it's a learning platform, a monitoring system or a national databank, the same test applies: when this is finished, does the client truly own it — portably, independently — or do they own a dependency on you? We think the answer should always be the former.
Frequently asked
- What does SCORM give you?
- Portability: content built to the standard isn't married to one vendor's system, and the tracking data follows open conventions — so if the client changes platforms, their content and records go with them.
- How do you avoid vendor lock-in?
- Open formats, documented systems, exportable data, and source code and knowledge that genuinely transfer at handover — decisions made at the start, not retrofitted at the end.