If you’re like most CEOs, you don’t have time for your lawn, so you hire a lawn service to keep it healthy and appealing.

Chances are you don’t know anything about the equipment used on your property. And you don’t care because you’re not buying equipment — you’re buying a service, a capability, and, most importantly, an end result.

That’s precisely the approach we advise CEOs to use when considering information technology. Like taking care of the lawn, discussions about IT also should be about an end result.

So don’t let conversations about how IT can help your organization address a business challenge or exploit an opportunity drift into elaborate product and solution debates. Too often, you’ll end up confused, frustrated, and unclear about how to proceed.

To keep IT discussions from becoming too technical, you need to stay focused on capability.

For example, you know your customer service operation needs to handle a certain number of calls per minute and can’t be down more than, say, five minutes a day. So all you need to know about your IT operation is that it’ll support this level of service. You don’t need to know or care what products are used or why.

A trusted partner will usually understand your business goals and help you achieve them — not try to blind you with technology.