Who do you think is the most "Technology Oriented / technical" spokes person of the Indian IT Services Industry?

According to me the serious Need of the hour in the Indian IT Services industry is a strong tech savvy public CTO may be even CEO, in the current organizations "TECHNOLOGY" isnt the top of the mind its stuff like recruitment pipeline,employee cost etc not that these aren't important but we shouldn't forget the whole foundation of this industry - Technology.In the top management dashboards (Weekly/Monthly) at IT Services companies is there isnt anything related to technology??? - NO, its all about the MCASE/Utilization etc etc. Today what are most IT Services companies thinking about ? How are they approaching their business? Its still all about T&M deals , about getting the people and to the staff locations, "Its still a lot more about throwing bodies at a problem" rather than solving the problem.

A common answer to such questions by customer on technical capabilities are "We have COE's (centers of excellence)" - Yes most organizations have multiple COE's focussed on a different technology or product sets, but there are treated more as Whitepaper generation units or people processing factory etc. In common parlance these are CC (Cost Centers), but i believe this kind of approach / thinking is really going to hurt them in the long run, COE should & can be delivery much much more.

Why do i bring this up now? This thinking was triggered from reading a couple of blog posts, first this at Sramana's Blog by a guest author, on how its essential that we get the technology product part right if we want the Indian IT Industry to have the right impact on the economy and the world at large and the other one i read and commented about regarding the quality of technical talent in INDIA at Steve Hamm (Author Bangalore Tiger).

Things need to change we need to start this change process TODAY.

If some of the readers have proof or thoughts to the contrary i would love to hear them. Please comment.

Also find a WIP mind map on Indian IT Services, here in PDF and in Flickr here.

Prashanth Rai