A company has found a unique way to improve customer service and outdo its competitors. The company’s leadership told its IT staff to set aside its routine activities for two weeks and instead compete in an internal hackathon. The goal was to identify a business problem and find a solution. At first, the company’s leaders weren’t sure what they had started, but at the end of the two weeks, they were blown away by the ideas that surfaced. One team implemented a tracking app that showed customers the real-time location of delivery trucks, which significantly boosted customer satisfaction and reduced calls to the company’s help desk by 75 percent. The exercise showed how big the payoff can be when skilled IT workers devote more time to helping their company succeed rather than fighting infrastructure fires or performing routine activities like software patching.