At work we have just secured funding to develop a complex research-oriented information system for internal use. This system will have to support the daily work of over 100 scientists and technicians, manage 10 TB of data, and be available remotely as well as locally. These figures will increase at roughly 10% per year.

I am the designated project manager. Although I have extensive experience in some architectural styles that may be applicable, and some technologies that we may choose to employ, I wouldn't like to embark in the project without careful consideration of all the options available in order to pick the best ones. To this end, I would like to perform some kind of assessment of options regarding architecture and technologies. There are several options to carry out these assessments, such as doing them in-house (affordable but time-consuming, and perhaps not too reliable), asking an external party to do them for us (maybe expensive), relying on existing reports or previous work, or a combination of all these.

My questions are:

1. Do you think this kind of assessment is a good idea before we start with the engineering stage of the project? Is it worthwhile?
2. How do you think we should carry out the assessments? What basic approaches there are, and what are their pros and cons?

Thanks.