First of all, Craig, thanks very much for the compliment; I do my best.

Regarding your question, I'm embarrassed to say I'm not entirely clear what you're asking, so I'll try to clarify what I originally meant.

In my opinion, the people who pay for a company's IT don't care what technologies we use. Any users of IT will judge our work in their terms, not ours, so they won't care if we use SQL Server or Oracle, but will care if they can't access their data. As a result, I believe we should concentrate on achieving what our users need achieved and only worry about technical elegance after that. A technically elegant solution may well be important in terms of ongoing maintenance and so on, but is irrelevant if the solution doesn't meet the business's needs.

The uniqueness for IT is its ability to touch all areas of the business, so our capacity to make the difference relies on our ability to understand the business and the processes it both uses and needs. If we can do that, we should be able to switch between which db platform we use, which server OS, which client OS, which CRM package, which financial package end so on according to what we can afford, what is currently available and how well it meets our current needs. Eventually, the business will judge us on how much value IT provides to the business, not on the tools we use.