Years ago I was the IT guy for a local government budget office.
After I stopped the servers from crashing any spending an hour rebuilding every day, and fixed the backup system so it actually backed up data, I had plenty of free time.
Instead of hiding in my office looking busy while playing MUDS/Nethack I took the time to sit with individual users, and quietly //observe their workflow.//
They spent most of the day comparing two columns of numbers (one from mainframe, one from SQL) for equality.
After a quick VBA prototype, they ended up with simple daily reports of where the numbers didn't match, saving about 40 hours a day between the 20 analysts.
The key thing many IT guys miss, is taking the time to fully understand what the users actually need/want; but instead jump to conclusions that everyone wants what a programmer wants.