The best way to know what problems exist is to experience firsthand how customers interact with the products and services you offer. "If you look at a highly innovative organization, the first characteristic you see is awareness -- awareness of the needs that need to be fulfilled and of the know-how that's around you," says Robert Price, former CEO of Control Data Corp. and author of The Eye for Innovation: Recognizing Possibilities and Managing the Creative Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2005).

At Amazon.com Inc., for instance, the mantra is, "Start with the customer and work backwards," says Werner Vogels, CIO at the Web retailer. Technology staffers are also regular users of the site, and most undergo a training program in which they take customer calls and respond to e-mails. At weekly meetings, they review e-mails that customer service has received and address frequent questions. "People have to feel responsible that we're really serving customers," Vogels says.

Similarly, when Pitney Bowes wanted to develop a next-generation call center system to improve interaction between customer service representatives and callers, it had IT staffers spend weeks in the call center, listening to calls and studying staff needs.

In innovation circles, embedding yourself within a community of people to see the world through their eyes is sometimes referred to as "ethnography," and it's highly encouraged. "For the IT department to be motivated by true human insight is a wonderful thing," Andrews says.

The idea for JetBlue Airways Corp.'s "paperless cockpit" germinated from just that type of insight, says Todd Thompson, CIO at the Forest Hills, N.Y.-based airline. "It came from sitting in the cockpit and seeing pilots pull out books from those heavy cases they carry around," he says. And after sitting in on morning meetings with managers while they continuously reviewed operations statistics -- such as average baggage-retrieval or airplane-turnaround time -- IT also developed a dashboard system that pushes that data in real time to their desktops.