 For every software system that you deploy, make sure you run it. Make sure you see what the interface looks like. Make sure that you have at least some passing familiarity with do they need to press F6 twice followed by the escape key to get somewhere, or is it a point and click? It always drives me nuts when I hear IT professionals say, oh, I never ran that, I just installed it and deployed it. And it really is a kind of an abdication of your responsibilities. What I'm doing better as a CIO is understanding what's going on. And when a VP or something comes back and says, you know, this isn't really working the way we were hoping that it would work, then I have an understanding of what the core issues involved are and where we need to make adjustments and improvements to the interface and that kind of thing. But the role of empathy in an IT professional's life goes, it's not just a CIO thing, it goes all the way down the chain to the help desk technician who has to answer the phone and actually empathize with the end user who can't, for some reason, open up a mail message.