The first thing to do is think.

Everything you do is leverage for everything else. Since your user's perception of you is only through the services they use take that point of view when providing them. The difference between an architect and an administrator is that the administrator goes "Damn, the router failed" and the architect either says "Good thing we talked to business folks and made sure they didn't want to pay for that upgrade" or "Glad I made that redundant". The more you save your company money taking these steps is frequently measured by your IT savvy, how hard you work and how well you know what your company actually does. The more places you can pinpoint those questions the better you will be, and remember sometimes the politics matter more than the ROI. Actually that's kind of naive, politics always influences everything at a big company. I like working at a place that is really big on demonstrable returns. If you can drop your downtime by 50% with the same budget in a year that's good stuff.

Can you even tell?

About 2 years ago I was freaking out. In my mind I was so good at my job that I'd made my self obsolete. I kind of had...if they wanted things to be as good as they where before I got there. We had something like 30-40 hosts, most of them on 6am to 6pm uptime requirements and an email server that required rebooting once every week or two. From my understanding of most small to mid sized shops that's normal and it really does not have to be that way. The majority of stuff that consultants like to charge massive cash for is either stuff you can look up on the Internet or little tricks. This is my attempt at sharing some of the little tricks.