IT is a business, not a hobby.
Do it with grown-ups.

Some technical wizards have come to you with a 200-page proposal to spend $20 million over the next three years integrating the “framis infrastructure“ with state-of-the-art “confabulated” authorization services pipelined through the “chrono-synclastic infidibulum” via serial buses.

You ask a few tough questions. They answer them.

They explain everything. It all makes perfect sense. It's a no-brainer. They've studied it nine ways from Sunday and this is the way to go and there's nothing you can throw at them they haven't anticipated and prepared for and if you don't approve it, you're a fossil whose time has come and gone.

Maybe they're right. Problem is, where's the loyal opposition that's going to debate them and make them prove their point? And how do you know that there aren't less sexy but also less expensive and easier-to-implement alternatives they might never even have contemplated because they got wowed by aggressive salespeople at the latest vendor confab? Or they are the aggressive salespeople.

As a businessperson, you want maximum leverage out of your IT investment. You want your business needs to drive your technology strategy, not the other way around. Your in-house people are good, but projects like these are "time available" assignments and they wish they had some objective eyes doing deep dives on their behalf and lending perspective.

As a TechPar client, you can put those issues to some of the smartest, most experienced and business-oriented technologists available. We've run IT organizations for some of the biggest companies in the world: Merck, Citigroup, Federal Reserve Bank of NY, PwC, Sharp Electronics. It'll take your in-house IT professionals about ten minutes to realize that they're connecting up with people who are uniquely suited to help them work through the knottiest technical, organizational, project management, vendor selection and implementation issues. People who have been where they are and have come out the other end successfully.

By the way, if you've got a thorny IT issue, try to refrain from asking your computer genius kid, unless you think that zapping Cylons with death rays is in your company's best interest.