Boxes and Arrows carries a good article about Designing Customer-Centered Organizations (thanks Tom) that is aimed at designers and people who think about creating user experiences on behalf of companies
It argues that user experience professionals must go beyond project- and product-strategy to think about applying their ideas across a wider framework of organisational structure and behaviour

“To create innovative and useful products, our most common approaches are insufficient. We must be ready to sacrifice traditional style guides and a fixation on formal concerns that promote surface consistency and instead strive for new frameworks that ensure consistency of user experience. Rather than see usability, design, and product management as separated by a rigid wall akin to the division of church and state, we must pool our skills in a common pursuit of outstanding products. Rather than transfer blame for failure to business people’s bad decisions and failures to listen to us, we must take responsibility for better communication to decision-makers and for the ultimate success or failure of our products and companies.”

This is an interesting perspective, although it is somewhat designer-centric and perhaps assumes a greater level of influence over organisational issues than these people actually command
It reminds me of work *some* of us here did (in a previous life) with Round – a rather innovative consulting company specialising in issues of customer centricity. We built the orginal version of a flash-based demonstrator of their four-base model of customer centricity (in which product- and customer-focus are only the first two goals) and later helped them convert their deeper consulting methodology into an online product that is being used by at least one major European telecoms company
The various enablers and approaches that Round engage with show that the task of creating customer-centric organisations extends way beyond the competence of user experience designers, important though they are.