From the trenches in large corporate (aka 'enterprise') tech departments: * Technology decisions in large organizations will often not be made based on technic

From the trenches in large corporate (aka 'enterprise') tech departments: * Technology decisions in large organizations will often not be made based on technical evaluations or merit. Some other arbitrary thing will influence a decision. You will get stuck with technically inferior product and have to deal, some call this job security. * If you propose something and it gets floated up the management chain, chances are good that management will not "buy in". Not until they hire consultants to come in at $300-500/hr to spend 6 months or more and come back with the same decision. Possibly using a technology the consultants are pimping out, see point above. * Buying COTS (customizable off the shelf software) with a 20% yearly maintenance/support fee to do basic IT functions is viewed as being cheaper than hiring software developers to build and maintain it. Even when there are open source solutions. * Maintaining a list of "approved" vendors. This really narrows your possible solution set. When the vendors know this they will keep increasing fees. * Offshoring work to save money. Many times this is not really done to save a department money. They will use accounting loop holes to track the offshore work as a 'service' and not labor. It will cost your department more in terms of delivery time but they don't care. * Decision making by committee. Your job is to make decisions and the dysfunction is so bad that people will not work together. Not in a dramatic way, just passive aggressive, ignorance, etc. Every decision takes forever because they have to confer with multiple peers, go through management hierarchy for some, etc.