For IT managers like Rodrigues, trust is focused on trusting oneself -- the experience, judgment, and expertise created in the school of hard knocks. He relies on two main resources: a network of IT colleagues, now long-time friends, and what he calls "brutally honest" relationships with vendors.

The network is a tested, close-knit set of trusted relationships. Its members discuss issues, problems, products, vendors. "We talk about what's going on and if we have a particular issue we bounce them off each other," he says. "Nine times out of 10, a fresh pair of eyes and or gray matter will produce an answer or at least an explanation or workaround."

With vendors, Rodrigues has developed a simple guiding philosophy: show me. "I have been lucky enough over the years to have developed brutally honest relationships with vendors," he says. "My only loyalty is to what works."

Recently, he was looking into a new switching fabric for the city's network infrastructure. One vendor invited him to headquarters. "I was shown the production environment, got to sit in briefly in one of their training classes, and got to spend hours in a hardware lab with dedicated lab personnel, building actual network topologies that would mimic my designs," he says. "In this particular instance some of the capabilities of the hardware and software exceeded my expectations and got me rethinking the way I design networks."