What is the future of IT leadership?

I think the future of IT Leadership is to first build reputation in market that the quality of a vendor is never questioned and overall market impression is that the Outsourced Company is best in class for its quality. Once clients start looking at cutting costs the first to be touched are those who are always questionable on basis of Quality and Reputation. To site some examples Microsoft or Oracle in a very well developed and implemented setup would be the last to take brunt of cost cutting than small time Maintenance vendors.

Client empathy is gone out of picture in the last few years of corporate growth. The IT Outsourcing companies and there top management is only playing the game of profit margins and revenues. Sometimes due to mismangemed planning, or wrong sales predictions or wrong investment decisions the Client may go under fire like Lehman and similar Ibanks. In such a scenario the IT Outsourcing companies should empathise with the client and help them come out of the fix with lesser costs, more delayed billing or different revenue cycles sometimes even helping in consolidation of operations at the cost of ones revenues. This would develop a long lasting relationship which the Client would definitely repay once he has circumsized his problems

IT Outsourcing companies are the best to be informed about upcoming technology trends, evolving product and technology spectrums most importantly game changing features in products. The client CIOs, CTOs are generally concentrating on Project Success and ROIs for investment. In such a scenario the IT Outsourcing companies should direct and infuse the idea with the Client to change to a lighter technology or a enhanced version of product and present proactively ways of ROIs for the same. No client would be inhibitant to adopt to newer investments when he can realise now only immediate but long term value.

It would be nice if there can be a great session of knowledge sharing.

I think IT should try to develop a back up for themselves to sustain both in recession and boom. IT always focuses on few things when there is a lot more to conquer. Different option are thought about only during recession, thats the basic problem with IT. Its high time we learn from our mistake and try to refrain from it in future.

Alexander the Great was actually never tall, superbuilt or a master swordsman. Yet he conquered half the world as history says. The main reason being he was a good Leader. All Leaders irrespective of the domain require this quality of being supremely acceptable by the others. In this regard the future of IT leadership will only depend upon the personal capacities of the Leaders in the organisation to bring about the best with their employees and the R&D. The way things are today good Leader do not exist any more. There are only rich leaders and this is the shortfall the industry faces today as most Leaders trade their skills for partly bonuses and salaries, by leaving and joining other companies, rather than give a real value added boost to the Co they are in. The Future looks not so good from my view.