That's "expert" is your "inferior," not your "peer."

It happens often that a manager trying to seek outside opinion ends up with some phoney consultant.

This could happen due to (but not limited to):

• bad luck
• "someone else's are better" mentality
• just wanting to hear what one wants to hear
• the "expert" being a friend of someone

Once there's this consultant whose solution to every architectural problem is ASP and OOP. He even said OOP could be applied to SQL. (While I believe OO Design could be applied more generally, twisting OOP into not OOP language is just plain weird.)

And his answer to why he hadn't propose any new architecture to our system was that we hadn't written up extensive enough our business rules.

Another technical consultant was invited to tell us why the new MSSQL (it was 7 or 2000 or something?) was better (than whatever). It turned out to be a hour long sales pitch. One of his argument why the new MSSQL was good was MS spent billions on it. (If money guaranteed success, life would be a lot more plainer.)