Pick a big company in this market (perhaps SAP) and start learning everything you can about them. Read their marketing pages and try to understand what they are selling and to whom. What problem do they think their customers have that they are solving?
Look for companies hiring people with those skills (i.e. that require SAP experience) and see what they are building (systems like SAP seem to produce value for the internals of a company and it's hard to see what this is from the outside).
Unfortunately the techno-babble on these enterprise systems sounds pseudo intelligent. To see through all the buzz words and fads you need to work with these systems for a while. But to do that you almost have to drink the Kool Aid. The trick is to stop drinking once you can see the better solution. For many people here, I suspect the hardest part is swallowing the Kool Aid (at least that's the hard part for me).
But then as you go to build your better system, you need to realize that you are going to try to sell this to people who have been consuming this stuff for a very long time. They need SCA, BPM, SOA, UML, and just about every other combination of three letter characters. They don't know any other way. It's unfathomable to them that there could be an easier, simpler solution to their woes. It's like trying to describe a 3D world to a denizen of 2D space.
1) Wikipedia: What GOOG, AAPL, MSFT, CSCO, and ORCL have bought in the past 10 years
2) sequoiacap.com (and other VC firms):What they're investing in. It's often pretty boring
3) bloomberg.com
Go beyond techcrunch and gizmodo and look for the non-sexy side of things.
Start networking. Talk to your parents, your friends, your friends' parents, your parents' friends, and anyone else who you can sit down with for 30 minutes. That should be plenty of time to listen to someone complain about their problems, and from that you should be able to make a list of possible business ideas. Then all you have to do is research them and figure out which one, if any, are viable.
This is something I have been struggling with too. I would love to make a useful web app that businesses would pay for, but all my ideas are something to do with software development, as that is all I know ...
I do try to speak to people in other industries from time to time to get ideas, but have got none so far :(
All we need is a 'social site' that non IT types can post their frustrations with the tools of their trade on to give us ideas - only problem is how we get non IT types to use it :-)
